THE MITFORDS
Letters Between Six Sisters
EDITED BY
CHARLOTTE MOSLEY

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

INDEX OF NICKNAMES

THE MITFORD FAMILY TREE

EDITOR’S NOTE

INTRODUCTION

ONE · 1925–1933

TWO · 1933–1939

THREE · 1939–1945

FOUR · 1945–1949

FIVE · 1950–1959

PLATES

SIX · 1960–1966

SEVEN · 1967–1973

EIGHT · 1974–1994

NINE · 1995–2003

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

NANCY (28 November 1904–30 June 1973) ‘Naunce(ling)’, ‘The Old French Lady’, ‘The Lady’, ‘Dame’, ‘Susan’, ‘Soo’.

Married to Peter Rodd, 1933–58. No children. Studied briefly at the Slade School of Art before embarking on a writing career with Vogue and The Lady. Worked in London at Heywood Hill bookshop during the war. Fell in love with Free French officer Gaston Palewski in 1942, moved to Paris in 1946 to be near him and remained in France, an ardent Francophile, for the rest of her life. Flirted with socialism and fascism before becoming a staunch Gaullist after meeting Palewski. Achieved fame with her post-war novels and repeated the success with four historical biographies. Author of the novels Highland Fling (1931), Christmas Pudding (1932), Wigs on the Green (1935), Pigeon Pie (1940), The Pursuit of Love (1945), Love in a Cold Climate (1949), The Blessing (1951) and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960), and of the historical biographies Madame de Pompadour (1954), Voltaire in Love (1957), The Sun King (1966) and Frederick the Great (1970). Editor of a collection of letters of nineteenth-century Mitford cousins, The Ladies of Alderley (1938) and The Stanleys of Alderley (1939), and of a volume of essays and journalism, The Water Beetle (1962). Her notorious article on ‘U and Non-U’ (upper-and non-upper-class usage) in Encounter magazine (1954) was reprinted in Noblesse Oblige (1956).

PAMELA (25 November 1907–12 April 1994) ‘Pam’, ‘Woman’, ‘Woo’, ‘Wooms’, ‘Woomling’.

Down-to-earth in her tastes and interests, she was a superb cook and happiest living in the country in the company of her dogs. From 1930 to 1934, she managed the farm at Biddesden in Wiltshire for Diana’s first husband, Bryan Guinness. Married to physicist Professor Derek Jackson, 1936–51. No children. When married, she lived at Rignell House, Oxford, before moving to Tullamaine Castle, Ireland, in 1947. In 1963, she settled in Zurich and shared her life with two women, Giuditta Tommasi and Rudi von Simolin. Returned to England in the mid-1970s to live at Woodfield House in Gloucestershire, which she had bought in 1960. She became an acknowledged expert on rearing poultry. Entertained the idea of writing a cookbook but never found time to finish it.

DIANA (17 June 1910–11 August 2003) ‘Cord(uroy)’, ‘Bodley’, ‘Honks’, ‘Nard(y)’.

The acknowledged beauty of the family. Married to Bryan Guinness, 2nd Baron Moyne, 1929–34. Two sons, Jonathan and Desmond. Married fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley in 1936. Two sons, Alexander and Max. A visit to the 1933 Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally ignited a lifelong admiration for Hitler. Imprisoned in Holloway in 1940 under Defence Regulation 18B. Released in 1943, reunited with her children, and held under house arrest until the end of the war. Moved to Ireland in 1951 and lived between Co. Galway, Co. Cork and France. Settled permanently outside Paris in 1963. Until Mosley’s death in 1980, she devoted herself to the furtherance of his comfort and happiness. Edited and contributed to The European, 1953–60, a monthly magazine to advance Mosley’s ideas of a united Europe. Reviewed for Books & Bookmen and the Evening Standard. Author of an autobiography, A Life of Contrasts (1977), pen portraits of friends, Loved Ones (1985), and a biography, The Duchess of Windsor (1980).

UNITY (8 August 1914–28 May 1948) ‘Bobo’, ‘Boud(le)’, ‘Bird(ie)’.

Artistic, rebellious and keen to shock, she became a supporter of the Nazis after attending the Nuremburg Parteitag with Diana in 1933. Moved to Munich in 1934. Met Hitler in February 1935 and continued to see him frequently until the outbreak of war. Attempted to commit suicide in 1939 when war was declared between England and Germany. She lived on as an invalid, cared for by her mother, until her death aged thirty-three.

JESSICA (11 September 1917–23 July 1996) ‘Decca’, ‘Hen’, ‘Henderson’, ‘Boud’, ‘Susan’, ‘Soo’, ‘Steake’, ‘Squalor’.

Became a socialist in her teens and eloped, aged nineteen, to civil-war-torn Spain to marry her cousin Esmond Romilly. Moved to America in 1939. Esmond joined the Canadian Air Force and was killed in 1941. Two daughters, Julia (died at five months) and Constancia (‘Dinky’). Married American attorney Robert Treuhaft in 1943. Two sons, Nicholas (died aged ten) and Benjamin. Active member of the American Communist Party, 1944–58, and energetic campaigner for civil rights. The success of her autobiography, Hons and Rebels (1960), enabled her to make a living from writing. Prolific investigative journalist and author of Lifeitselfmanship (1956), The American Way of Death (1963), The Trial of Dr Spock (1969), Kind and Usual Punishment (1973), a second volume of memoirs, A Fine Old Conflict (1977), The Making of a Muckraker (1979), Faces of Philip, A Memoir of Philip Toynbee (1984), Grace Had an English Heart (1988) and The American Way of Birth (1992).

DEBORAH (31 March 1920 –) ‘Debo’, ‘Hen’, ‘Henderson’, ‘9’, ‘Stublow’, ‘Miss’.

Married, in 1941, Lord Andrew Cavendish, who succeeded his father as 11th Duke of Devonshire in 1950. One son, Peregrine, two daughters, Emma and Sophia. Immunized by her sisters’ fanatical views, she remained firmly apolitical all her life. An astute and capable businesswoman, she was largely responsible for putting Chatsworth, the Devonshire family home, on to a sound footing after she and her husband moved back into the house in 1959. Accused by Nancy of illiteracy, she was suspected by her family and friends of being a secret reader. Diana believed that unlike most people who pretend to have read books that they have not, Deborah pretended not to have read books that she had. She took to writing late in life and produced The House: A Portrait of Chatsworth (1982), The Estate, A View of Chatsworth (1990), Farm Animals (1991), Treasures of Chatsworth (1991), The Garden at Chatsworth (1999), Counting My Chickens (2001), The Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth Cookery Book (2003) and Round About Chatsworth (2005).

INDEX OF NICKNAMES

Al | Alexander Mosley, Diana’s son
Bird/Birdie | Unity
Blor | Laura Dicks, the Mitfords’ nanny
Bobo | Unity
Boud/y | Unity
Cake | Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
Cha | Charlotte Mosley, Diana’s daughter-in-law and editor of these letters
Colonel, Col | Gaston Palewski
Cord | Diana
Count/y | Jean de Baglion
Cuddum | Communist
Deacon | Elizabeth Cavendish, Deborah’s sister-in-law
Debo | Deborah
Decca | Jessica
Diddy | Ellen Stephens, the Devonshires’ nanny
Dink/y/Donk | Constancia Romilly, Jessica’s daughter
Duch (my) | Mary, Duchess of Devonshire, Deborah’s mother-in-law
Em | Emma Tennant, née Cavendish, Deborah’s elder daughter
Farve | Lord Redesdale
Fat Friend (F. F.) | President John F. Kennedy
Fem | Lady Redesdale
French Lady | Nancy
Hen/Henderson | Deborah or Jessica
Honks | Diana
Id/Idden | Ann Farrer, a first cousin of the Mitfords
Jonnycan | Jonathan Guinness, Diana’s eldest son
Kit | Oswald Mosley
Lady | Nancy
Leader/Lead | Oswald Mosley
Little gurl | Sophia Cavendish, Deborah’s younger daughter
Loved One | President John F. Kennedy
Maggot | Margaret Ogilvy
Mrs Ham | Violet Hammersley
Muv | Lady Redesdale
Nard/y | Diana
Naunce/Naunceling | Nancy
Oys | James and Chaka Forman, Jessica’s grandsons
P’s/Parent Birds | Lord and Lady Redesdale
Prod | Peter Rodd, Nancy’s husband
Recs | Chickens
Revereds | Lord and Lady Redesdale
Rud/Rudbin | Joan Farrer, a first cousin of the Mitfords
Sir O | Oswald Mosley
Squalor | Jessica
Sto/Stoker | Peregrine Hartington, Deborah’s son
Tig | Anne Tree, née Cavendish, Deborah’s sister-in-law
TPOF | Lady Redesdale, ‘The Poor Old Female’
Tud/Tuddemy | Tom Mitford
Uncle Harold | Harold Macmillan
Wid/Widow | Violet Hammersley
Wife | Lady Mersey
Woman/Woo/Wooms | Pamela

THE MITFORD FAMILY TREE

EDITOR’S NOTE

The correspondence between the six Mitford sisters consists of some twelve thousand letters – over four million words – of which little more than five per cent has been included in this volume. Out of the fifteen possible patterns of exchange between the sisters, there are only three gaps: no letters between Unity and Pamela have survived, and there are none from Unity to Deborah. The proportion of existing letters from each sister varies greatly: political differences led Jessica to destroy all but one of Diana’s letters to her, while the exchange between Deborah and Diana, the two longest-lived sisters, runs to some three thousand on each side.

The Mitfords had a brother, Tom, who was sent away to school aged eight while his sisters were taught at home. Although he composed many dutiful letters to his parents, Tom rarely wrote to the rest of the family. Unlike his sisters, for whom writing was as natural as speaking, he took no pleasure in the art of corresponding. (In 1937, in a brief note added to the bottom of one of Unity’s letters to Jessica, he deplored his ‘constitutional hatred’ for letter-writing.) Perhaps his later training as a barrister also made him wary of committing his thoughts to paper. Nancy often wrote to Tom before she married and although over a hundred of her letters to him have been preserved, as have a handful from his other sisters, the correspondence is so one-sided that no letters to or from Tom have been included in this volume.

Letters make a fragmentary biography at best and I have not attempted to present a comprehensive picture of the Mitfords’ lives; those seeking a more complete account can turn to the plentiful books by and about the family. In order to weave a coherent narrative out of the vast archive and link the six voices, I have focused my choice of letters on the relationship between the sisters. I have also selected striking, interesting or entertaining passages, as well as those that are particularly relevant to the story of their lives. While some letters have been included in their entirety, more often I have deliberately cut them, sometimes removing just a sentence, at other times paring them down to a single paragraph. To indicate all these cuts would be too distracting and they have therefore been made silently.

As in many families, the Mitfords used a plethora of nicknames and often several different ones for the same person. While the origins of most of these are long forgotten, the roots of a few can be traced. Sir Oswald Mosley, Diana’s husband of forty-four years, who was known as ‘Tom’ or ‘the Leader’ before the war and ‘Sir O’, ‘Sir Oz’ or ‘Sir Ogre’ after the war, was nearly always called ‘Kit’ by Diana. In private she admitted that the name came from ‘kitten’ but, realizing its inappropriateness for such a powerful character, she wrote in her memoirs that she could not remember how it had originated. Deborah knew him as ‘Cyril’ because as a young girl she had asked her mother how she should address her new brother-in-law and misheard her terse answer, ‘He’S Sir Oswald to me’. Nancy often referred to Mosley as ‘Keats’, a derivation of ‘Kit’. Deborah’S husband, Andrew Devonshire, was known as ‘Ivan’ (the Terrible) or ‘Peter’ (the Great), according to his mood. He was also called ‘Claud’ because when his title was Lord Harrington, before he inherited the dukedom, he used to receive letters addressed to ‘Claud Hartington Esq.’ To make matters even more complicated, Nancy and Jessica addressed and signed letters to each other as ‘Susan’ or ‘Soo’, for reasons now forgotten; Deborah and Jessica called each other ‘Hen’, and by extension ‘Henderson’, inspired by their passion for chickens; Jessica and Unity were to each other ‘Boud’, from a private language they invented as children called ‘Boudledidge’. Nancy addressed Deborah as ‘9’, the mental age beyond which she claimed her youngest sister had never progressed.

I have left unchanged the sisters’ numerous nicknames for one another as they are intrinsic to their relationships, but for clarity I have standardized other nicknames and regularized their spelling. The only other editorial changes that have been made to the text are the silent correction of spelling mistakes – except in childhood letters; the addition of punctuation where necessary; and the rectification of names of people, places and books. In my footnotes and section introductions, I have referred to people variously by their first name, surname or title, aiming for quick recognition rather than consistency. Foreign words or phrases have been translated in square brackets in the text; the translation of longer sentences has been put in a footnote.

As a child, Nancy invented a game in which she played a ‘Czechish lady doctor’ and adopted a thick foreign accent. This voice endured and the letters are scattered with ‘wondair’ for ‘wonderful’, ‘nevair’ for ‘never mind’, and other phonetic approximations of Mitteleuropean English. After Nancy moved to France, should she ever use a French word in conversation, Deborah, who did not admit to speaking the language, would interject with ‘Ah oui!’ or ‘Quelle horrible surprise’, expressions that have found their way into the letters. Deborah was also the instigator of the frequent plea ‘do admit’ – not something any Mitford did willingly – which was an attempt to catch the attention of one of her siblings and get them to agree with her. The exaggerated style of writing that the sisters used, a continuation of the drawling way in which they spoke, began in childhood and originated in part from their brother Tom’s ‘artful scheme of happiness’, a particular tone of voice that he employed when trying to wheedle something out of someone. ‘Boudledidge’, which Jessica and Unity often used in their letters to each other, was a derivation of this way of speaking. ‘Honnish’, a language invented by Jessica and Deborah, was derived not from the fact that as daughters of a peer they were Honourables but from the hens that played such an important part in their upbringing. Their mother, Lady Redesdale, had a chicken farm from whose slim profits she paid for the children’s governess and the sisters each kept their own birds and sold their eggs to their mother in order to supplement their pocket money.

The Mitford sisters all wrote in longhand, except for Jessica who learned to type at the beginning of the war. Their handwriting is clear and legible, and, as a rule, they dated their letters. Pamela, who was probably dyslexic, kept a dictionary at hand and her spelling is usually accurate. Her occasional use of unorthodox capitalizations and spelling has been retained. The sisters’ letters to each other are held in the archives at Chatsworth, where they have been collected by Deborah, with the exception of those written to Jessica which are in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Ohio State University. The letters in this volume are previously unpublished, except for a dozen that were included in Love from Nancy and three times that number in Decca.¹

At a certain point, the sisters became aware of the value of their letters and of the possibility that they might one day be published. In 1963, Nancy advised Deborah to throw nothing away because the correspondence of a whole family would be ‘gold for your heirs’. Pamela, who until then had discarded most of her letters, began to preserve them, and Jessica started keeping carbon copies of her correspondence in the 1950s. It is nevertheless abundantly clear that the sisters did not write with an eye to posterity; the frankness, immediacy and informal style of their communications bear this out. Only when I had begun editing these letters did the idea of publication at times inhibit the two surviving sisters. A few months before she died in 2003, Diana wrote to Deborah, ‘I’ve started this letter and for the first time in my life I can’t think of anything to say. My old mind is a blank. If this had happened sooner it would have saved Charlotte a lot of trouble.’ Happily, it did not.

1 Love From Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford, edited by Charlotte Mosley (Hodder & Stoughton, 1993); Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, edited by Peter Y. Sussman (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006).

INTRODUCTION

The Mitford sisters first began to make headlines in the late 1920s and have rarely been out of the news since. Between them they were close to many key figures of the last century. They knew Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and Hitler; were friends of Lytton Strachey, Evelyn Waugh and Maya Angelou; sat for Augustus John, Lucian Freud and Cecil Beaton; entertained the Queen, the Duchess of Windsor and Katherine Graham; were guests of Lord Berners, Goebbels and Givenchy. They lived out their lives in very different spheres, from the London of the Bright Young Things, pre-war Munich and cosmopolitan Paris, to rural Ireland, left-wing California and the deep English countryside.

How did these six sisters, offspring of parents whose highest hopes for their daughters were that they should make good wives, achieve such fame? Some clues can be found in the personalities and careers of their forebears. Talent often misses a generation and the sisters’ grandfathers on both sides of the family were notable in their day. Bertram Mitford, the 1st Baron Redesdale, was a diplomat, politician and author. His memoirs were admired by Edmund Gosse and his collection of popular Japanese stories, Tales of Old Japan, is still in print today. The Mitfords’ maternal grandfather, Thomas Gibson Bowles, was a politician and journalist who started the popular weekly satirical magazine Vanity Fair (unrelated to its modern namesake) and The Lady, founded in 1883 and still famous for its classified columns advertising for domestic help. A combative and opinionated self-made man, Bowles used Vanity Fair and his position as a Member of Parliament as weapons to bring down his opponents. Never afraid of saying what he thought, he relished being a gadfly to the Establishment and engaged in a constant guerrilla warfare of press campaigns and court cases. His energy, wit and what The Times described as a ‘temperamental dislike of compromise’ passed down in generous measure to his granddaughters, who also inherited his interest in politics and a gift for writing.

While the sisters’ enduring reputation owes much to their originality, forceful opinions, and good looks, the turbulent times in which they grew up provided the catalyst for their highly publicized exploits. The decade leading up to the Second World War was one of ideological extremes and, like many of their contemporaries, they were drawn to radical politics which they saw as the answer to Europe’s ills. Their beliefs spanned the political spectrum, from fascism, Nazism and communism, to socialism, Gaullism and Conservatism, politics dividing the family as surely as religion had done in former centuries, political absolutism replacing religious absolutes. The causes they took up were closely connected with the men who embodied them, with the difference that Unity and Jessica chose men whose politics corresponded with their own natural ideological tendencies, while Nancy and Diana’S political beliefs were sustained by the men they loved.

For a family that is regarded as quintessentially English it is interesting that all the sisters, except Deborah, spent much of their lives abroad. Consciously or unconsciously, the desire to set themselves apart from their siblings, to stand out as individuals and not just as one of the ‘Mitford girls’, drove them not only into opposite political camps but also to different parts of the world. What the sisters shared, however, was stronger than that which divided them. In spite of their differences, and however little their daily lives might have in common, they needed to keep in touch; recounting their lives to each other was a vital part of their existence. Only Jessica broke this chain by completely severing ties with Diana before the war, when political antipathy replaced her childhood love for her ‘favourite person in the world’, and when too much bitterness made meeting on the basis of sisterly fondness ‘unthinkable’.

A family correspondence of this scope and size is rare; for it to include four such gifted writers makes it unique. Nancy, Diana, Jessica and Deborah were all published authors, their books international bestsellers that are mostly still in print. Even Unity, whose suicide attempt effectively cut off her development in her mid-twenties, and Pamela, who was slowed down by a bout of childhood polio, wrote with natural, distinctive voices.

Eighty years separate the earliest surviving letter between the sisters – a note written in 1923 by nine-year-old Unity, who was on a seaside holiday in Sussex, to thirteen-year-old Diana who had stayed at home – and the last – a fax sent in 2003 by 83-year-old Deborah from her home in England to 93-year-old Diana who was dying in Paris. The letters began as a trickle while the sisters were still living at home, swelled in number in the 1930s as they gradually went out into the world, and reached a flood after the war when they setfled in different countries and saw each other less often. Although they started using the telephone in the 1950s – Diana and Deborah used to ring regularly on Sunday mornings and when Nancy and Diana were both living in France they spoke almost daily – telephoning remained of secondary importance; letters were their principal means of keeping in touch. The post and everything that touched on it played a key part in their lives: Jessica left $5,000 in her will to her local postman; Deborah’s idea of contentment in old age was to be the postmistress of a small village; and at the end of her life Diana was reconciled to moving from a house and garden in the suburbs to a flat in Paris mainly because it was situated immediately above a post office. While the sisters’ correspondence with one another represents just a fraction of their total output – they rarely left a letter unanswered and kept up with many hundreds of other correspondents – it is unique because it was sustained over a lifetime.

The strength of feeling amongst the sisters was intense: childhood love, sympathy, generosity and loyalty were mixed with hate, envy, resentment and exasperation – sentiments that remained with them to a greater or lesser extent throughout their lives and give their letters to one another an adolescent quality which persists even in old age. During their childhood, alliances were formed and broken, common enemies fought then sided with. As they grew up, politics hardened their positions and determined which camp they chose to support. In a family where overt demonstrations of love were avoided and where the English upper-class code of frowning on any public display of emotion was observed, teasing was a relatively safe way of dealing with sibling rivalry and of expressing affection. The joking relationship between them acted as a safeguard, creating an environment in which tensions could be defused before they grew too serious. Nancy, as the eldest, was usually the instigator of these practices which she carried on even in later life, partly in commemoration of schoolroom custom but also because her jealousy of her sisters was never fully resolved and her feelings towards them remained ambivalent. Teasing, in her hands, could become a cruel weapon, while for the others it was a way of deflating self-importance or relieving the tedium of long winter evenings when they had only each other for company. Their father, Lord Redesdale, disliked having people to stay, and when there were guests he did not always make them feel welcome. Once when the house was full of Nancy’s friends, he shouted down the table to his wife, ‘Have these people no homes of their own?’

Jessica described having sisters as ‘a great toughening and weathering process’ which prepared one for later life. When Nancy once ventured that she thought sisters were a protection against life’s cruel circumstances, Jessica countered that, as a child, her sisters were the cruel circumstances. Diana wrote that she regarded it as a fault of their upbringing that it should be considered unthinkable to admit to ‘weakness, misery or despair’. Certainly all six sisters had the capacity to withstand private tragedy and public opprobrium with unusual resilience – often appearing insensible to other people’S opinions – and were practised at putting on a brave face and hiding their vulnerability behind a lightly worn armour of flippancy and self-deprecation. They wore this protective shield not just with the outside world, where it was often taken for ruthlessness, but also with each other and, with few exceptions, rarely shared their most intimate confidences. While avoiding emotional depth and turning everything into a joke is a widespread English custom, the sisters’ comic genius transformed a national character trait into an art form.

Less inhibited than their memoirs and more intimate than the biographies that have been written about them, the sisters’ correspondence explores the kaleidoscopic pattern of their shifting relationships and exposes less-well-known sides of their complex and contradictory characters. Unlike many books about the Mitford family that have focused on the years when the sisters’ exploits intersected with historical events, their letters cover their whole lives, revealing how triumphs and tragedies wore down their youthful fanaticism.

The sisters wrote to each other to confide, commiserate, tease, rage and gossip but above all they wrote to amuse; when something made them laugh, half the fun of it was to relate it to a sibling. Beneath their contrasting personalities they shared a common temperament: unconditional in their loves and hates and passionate about the causes they embraced, they also possessed the ability to laugh at themselves and to make light of even the darkest predicaments. It is this indomitable spirit, fierce courage and irrepressible enjoyment of life that make their letters so powerful, eloquent and entertaining.

I had letters from you & the Lady* & Henderson** today, wouldn’t it be dread if one had a) no sisters b) sisters who didn’t write.

Deborah to Diana, 21 July 1965

* Nancy

** Jessica

ONE 1925–1933

The Mitford children in 1921: Unity, Pamela, Deborah, Tom, Nancy, Jessica and Diana.

There are few letters to record the Mitford sisters’ childhood and early youth, and such letters as they did write were mostly to their mother and father. Nor are there many letters dating back to the eight years covered in this section. By 1925, only Nancy, aged twenty – one, and Pamela, aged eighteen, had gone out into the world; the four youngest children were still in the nursery or schoolroom. Nancy’s main family correspondent at the time was her brother Tom, and Pamela – who confided mostly in Diana – was the least prolific writer of the sisters.

When the letters begin, the family had been living for six years at Asthall Manor, a seventeenth-century house in the Cotswolds, which the sisters’ father, Lord Redesdale, had bought when he sold Batsford Park, a rambling Victorian pile that he had inherited in 1916 and could not afford to keep up. Before the First World War, David Redesdale, or ‘Farve’ as he was known to his children, lived in London where he worked as office manager for The Lady, the magazine founded by his father-in-law. Life in the country was far better suited to this unbookish, unsociable man, whose happiest moments were spent by the Windrush, a trout river that ran past Asthall, or in the woods where he watched his young pheasants hatch. Unluckily for his family, country sports did not exhaust his energies and Asthall, which the children loved, was not to his liking. In 1926, they moved to Swinbrook House in Oxfordshire, a grim, ungainly edifice that Lord Redesdale had built on top of a hill near Swinbrook village. All the sisters except Deborah, who was six when they moved, disliked the new house, which was cold, draughty and impractical. Worst of all, unlike Asthall where the library had been in a converted barn some distance from the house and where the children were left undisturbed, there was no room at Swinbrook that they could call their own. The younger children found some warmth and privacy in a heated linen cupboard, later immortalized in Nancy’s novels as the ‘Hons’ cupboard’, while the older children had to share the drawing room or sit in their small bedrooms. Lord Redesdale was hurt by the family’s dislike of his dream project and began to spend more time at 26 Rutland Gate, a large London house overlooking Hyde Park that he had bought when Asthall was sold.

The sisters were in awe of their father. Strikingly handsome, with the brilliant blue eyes that passed down to his children, he was kind-hearted, jovial and the source of much of the fun that was had in the family. Deborah remembered him as ‘charming, brilliant without being clever’ and uproariously funny when in a good mood. She wrote that when he and Nancy started sparring they were better than anything she had ever seen on stage, ‘a pair of comedians of the first order’. But he could also be impatient and had a violent temper. The smallest transgression – a child spilling her food or being a minute late – could send him into a towering rage. His anger was all the more alarming for being unpredictable: he would turn with sudden fury on one of his daughters and then, for no apparent reason, decide to single out another. Their way of standing up to him, and of drawing his unwrathful attention, was to catch their father in one of his sunnier moods and tease him, which he took in good part. Jessica used to call him ‘the Old Sub-Human’ and pretend to measure his skull for science or would gently shake his hand when he was drinking a cup of tea to give him ‘palsy practice’ for when he grew old. Nancy’s caricature of him in her first novel, Highland Fling, as the jingoistic, hot-tempered General Murgatroyd – a precursor of the formidable Uncle Matthew in her later novels – was an effective way of reducing this larger-than-life figure to less alarming dimensions. As they grew up, the sisters rarely seem to have resented Farve and looked back on his autocratic eccentricities with affectionate amusement. The inclination to hero – worship is foreshadowed in their relationship with their father; like the other powerful men who were to come into their lives, he could do no wrong.

Their resentment – and that of Nancy and Jessica in particular – against the perceived shortcomings of their upbringing was reserved for their mother. In contrast to her moody, volatile husband, Sydney, or ‘Muv’ as her children called her, was cool and detached. Her own mother had died when she was seven years old and at the age of fourteen she had taken on the responsibility of running her father’s household. This had taught her financial prudence and to be a good manager – qualities that came in useful later when raising a family of seven on never quite enough money – but it also created a certain rigidity in her attitude to her children when they were growing up; an inflexibility that fuelled her daughters’ rebellious behaviour and their desire to shock.

From her father, Lady Redesdale had inherited definite opinions about health and diet, believing that the ‘good body’ would heal itself more effectively without the intervention of doctors or medicine. An early campaigner against refined sugar and white flour, she made sure that her children ate only wholemeal bread, baked to her recipe. Physically undemonstrative, she rarely exhibited outward signs of maternal warmth and seldom hugged or cuddled her daughters, who had to compete fiercely for the scarce resource of her attention. In ‘Blor’, an essay on her childhood, Nancy described her mother as living ‘in a dream world of her own’, detached to the point of neglect. In her fictional portrait of her as Aunt Sadie, she depicted a more sympathetic character but one that was nevertheless remote and disapproving. But the aloofness that some of her daughters complained of also had its positive side, enabling their mother to remain calm in the face of an unpredictable husband and to deal impartially with six boisterous and constantly feuding girls (her ambition had been to have seven boys). She was also fair, principled, direct, selfless and honest to the point of innocence. As the sisters grew up and their escapades sent their mother reeling from one calamity to the next, her unshakeable loyalty and acceptance of their choices in life showed that she cared for her daughters very much indeed.

Like most girls of their class and generation, the sisters were educated at home. Lady Redesdale taught all her children until they were eight, after which the girls moved to the schoolroom to be instructed by governesses and Tom was sent away to boarding school. Nancy and Jessica blamed their mother for this lack of formal education, even though Lord Redesdale was just as opposed to sending his daughters to school. ‘Nothing would have induced him to waste money on anything so frivolous’, wrote Deborah. He also worried that they might develop thick calves from being made to play hockey. Neither parent believed that girls should be educated beyond basic literacy and regarded intellectual women as ‘rather dreadful’. The Redesdales’ views were not uncommon at the time but their children’s response was more unusual. Nancy’s bitterness at not having received what she considered a proper education was enduring and runs as a refrain throughout her correspondence. Jessica wrote that the dream of her childhood was to be allowed to go to school, and that her mother’s refusal to countenance it had burned into her soul.

It is questionable, however, whether the sisters would have been better educated had they gone away to school. At the time, fashionable establishments for girls taught social rather than intellectual skills, preparing pupils for marriage and the drawing-room rather than the workplace. When the Redesdales eventually allowed Nancy, at the age of sixteen, to go to Hatherop Castle, a small private school for girls from ‘suitable’ families, the mainly non-academic curriculum concentrated on music, dancing and French, whereas at home, the sisters were free to make use of their grandfather’s first-rate library and Nancy and Diana became bookworms at an early age. It was perhaps the boredom of being confined at home with only siblings for company that rankled with Jessica and Nancy as much as their lack of formal schooling. Not until they left home and had to earn a living – they were the only two sisters who did not marry rich men – did they have cause to view their rudimentary education as a handicap.

The age gap between the Mitford children meant that they formed almost two separate generations. In 1925, the year that opens this collection of letters, the older children, Nancy, Pamela, Tom and Diana, ranged between the ages of twenty-one and fifteen. The youngest three, Unity, Jessica and Deborah, were aged eleven, eight and five. Nancy had ‘come out’ when she was eighteen and had followed her first season as a debutante with three further years of weekend parties and balls. She had met the right people, made many friends and quite enjoyed herself, but she had failed to do the expected thing and find a husband. With very little money and no immediate prospects, she was living at home, taking out her frustration on her sisters. The three youngest looked up to her like a remote star: her vitality, cleverness and supreme funniness lit up the family atmosphere, as did her determination to turn everything into a joke, but she was too caustic and indiscreet to be the recipient of anyone’s confidences. In Unity’s copy of All About Everybody, a little book of printed questions that she asked her family and friends to fill in, Nancy put as her besetting sin ‘disloyalty’, a trait that could make her incomparably good company but an uncertain ally.

Nancy’s usual victim was Pamela, whose unguarded nature made her an obvious target for teasing. Diana, however, presented more of a challenge; she was fully Nancy’s intellectual equal, with just as determined a character, and was able to stand up to her sister’s bullying. Occasionally Nancy managed to exert her seniority and successfully torment her younger sister. When she was sixteen, she formed a company of Girl Guides, appointed herself captain and tried to make ten-year-old Diana salute her. On another occasion, she pretended to have heard the Redesdales discuss sending Diana to boarding school, an idea that filled her little sister with horror. But they both enjoyed reading, which drew them together, as did a similar sense of humour and a longing to escape the confinement of Swinbrook. As they grew up, they became, according to Diana, great friends. But underlying the friendship was a deep current of envy on Nancy’s part towards a younger sister who was already a great beauty and the instant centre of attention with the undergraduate friends that Nancy brought home. These feelings were exacerbated when Diana, aged eighteen, married the extremely rich and good-looking Bryan Guinness and became a sought-after London hostess.

Shortly before Diana’s engagement to Bryan in 1928, Pamela accepted a proposal of marriage from a neighbour of the Mitfords, Oliver Watney. The prospect of having two younger sisters married before she was may help to explain Nancy’s unwise decision to become unofficially engaged to Hamish St Clair-Erskine, a friend of Tom’s from Eton who was younger than her and homosexual. Her infatuation with Hamish dragged on for five unsatisfactory years, causing her a great deal of unhappiness. During this period she started to write her first articles for Vogue, and in 1930 was taken on as a regular contributor to cover social events for The Lady. This brought in a little pocket money, as did her first two novels, Highland Fling and Christmas Pudding, light satires on upper-class life that sketched out the world she would so successfully depict in her accomplished post-war novels.

Nancy used to say that the first three years of her life were perfect, ‘then a terrible thing happened, my sister Pamela was born’ which ‘threw me into a permanent rage for about 20 years’. Her affront at being supplanted in the nursery was compounded by an insensitive nanny who immediately shifted all her love and attention to the new baby. By the time Nancy was six and Pamela three, they might have overcome their differences and played together, had not Pamela contracted polio which affected her physical and mental development. She was in constant pain from an aching leg, and often tearful and sad. Her illness was doubtless a strain on Nancy: ‘you’ve got to be kind to Pam, she’s ill’, was dinned into her unceasingly. Instead of narrowing, as it normally would, the age gap between the two sisters widened. Pamela, who was the least able to defend herself, became Nancy’s scapegoat. She learnt to keep her head down and seems never to have shown any ill will towards her tormentor. She loved jokes as much as the rest of the family, and laughed about her own limitations, but she refused to retaliate or compete in the teasing. Her sisters nicknamed her ‘Woman’ because, like a symbolic character in a medieval Mystery Play, she epitomized the womanly virtues of simplicity and goodness. From her mother, she inherited dignity, common sense and the talent for making a comfortable home; from her father, a love of the countryside, where she was at her happiest. In 1925, when these letters begin, Pamela was a shy seventeen-year-old debutante, confiding to Diana her nervousness about going out into the world.

Unlike Nancy, who was a late developer and drew out her adolescence well into her twenties, Diana, by the time she was thirty, had been twice married, given birth to four sons and experienced the most eventful decade of her life. When these letters begin, she was a precocious fifteen-year-old, dreaming of independence. Her closest companion in the family, both in age and interests, was Tom, and when he was home for the holidays the two were inseparable. Diana admired her brother’s musical and intellectual talents and delighted in the company of his sophisticated friends. These glimpses of a world of art, music and intelligent conversation increased her yearning to escape the restrictive family atmosphere. The 1926 General Strike, sparked off by the grim working conditions in the coal mines, made a deep impression on her, kindling her social conscience and fostering a lifelong interest in politics. Whereas Nancy treated the national emergency as something of a joke and disguised herself as a tramp to frighten Pamela who was running a canteen serving food to strike-breaking lorry drivers, Diana felt the injustice of the miners’ situation acutely. Her interest in politics was also fuelled by visits to Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s family home in Kent. Churchill’s wife, Clementine, was a first cousin of Lord Redesdale, and two of the Churchill children, Diana and Randolph, were much the same age as Tom and Diana.

In 1927, Diana spent six months studying in Paris, where she said she learnt more than in six years of lessons at Asthall. For the first time in her life she was free of the strict chaperoning imposed by her parents and of having to jockey for position among her sisters. The painter Paul-César Helleu, a friend of Thomas Gibson-Bowles, was an important influence during her visit. He took her to the Louvre and Versailles, introduced her to his artist friends and admired her looks, making her aware for the first time of the effect of her exceptional beauty. When she returned to Swinbrook, Diana was more impatient than ever to get away from its schoolroom atmosphere. The following year, at the end of her first season, a proposal of marriage gave her the chance to escape. Bryan Guinness, the sensitive and diffident elder son of Lord Moyne and heir to a brewing fortune, fell deeply in love with her. A poet and novelist, Bryan was part of a group of Nancy’s Oxford friends that included Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, Roy Harrod, Harold Acton, James Lees-Milne, Henry Yorke and Robert Byron, young men whose interests represented everything that Diana aspired to. She and Bryan were married in January 1929 and divided their time between London and Biddesden, a fine eighteenth-century house in Wiltshire, where Diana was able to give free rein to her talent for decorating and entertaining. Unity, Jessica and Deborah often went to stay with the young couple and in 1930 Pamela settled in a nearby cottage to run the Biddesden farm. Nancy was a less frequent visitor. Caught up in her unhappy affair with Hamish and very short of money, it was galling to see Diana settled in a splendid house, surrounded by a loving husband and two healthy babies. However, the picture of happiness that Diana and Bryan presented was not as bright as it appeared. Although they were undoubtedly in love, there was a basic incompatibility between them that soon made itself felt. Increasingly, Bryan wanted to stay at home with only his family for company while Diana, who was eager to travel and fill her house with friends, found this domesticity all too reminiscent of the life she had so recently managed to escape.

In the spring of 1932, Diana sat next to Sir Oswald Mosley at a dinner party in London. The former Conservative MP and Labour Minister, whose New Party had been resoundingly defeated in the previous year’s general election, was preparing to break with parliamentary politics and launch the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Diana fell under the spell of this seasoned womanizer and compelling talker who seemed to her to have all the answers to Britain’s problems. In Mosley, she found the combination of a powerful man she could love and a cause to which she could dedicate herself, a pattern that Unity and Jessica – and to a lesser extent Nancy – were to conform to in their different ways. Mosley was married and made it clear that he would not leave his wife. Undeterred, and encouraged by Mosley, Diana decided to divorce Bryan in order to be available for her lover whenever he could spare the time from politics, family and the other women in his life. By throwing in her lot with Mosley, Diana was prepared to sacrifice her social position, distance herself from her beloved Tom, who disapproved of her leaving Bryan, alienate her parents – who refused to allow her two youngest sisters to visit her – and even risk losing her sons. She once wrote of her decision, ‘I probably ought to have behaved differently but I never regretted it’. Of the family, only Nancy supported Diana’s choice and became a regular visitor to the house in Eaton Square that Diana took after her divorce. It was no doubt easier for Nancy to be close to her sister when she was unpopular than when she was at the height of her success.

Unity was described by her mother as a sensitive, introverted little girl, who used to slip under the dining-room table if anything was said at meals that upset or embarrassed her. By the time she was eight, and had graduated to the schoolroom, she had become naughty and disruptive, her shyness concealed beneath a tough shell of sullen defiance. More solemn than her sisters, she lacked their quick wit and enjoyed practical rather than verbal jokes. In an effort to stand out, she behaved outrageously. When she was fourteen, partly because she was so difficult at home and partly because she wanted to go away, Lady Redesdale decided to make an exception among her daughters and sent Unity to boarding school. The three establishments she attended were no more successful at controlling her than her governesses had been and she was expelled from all of them. In 1932, she followed her older sisters and was launched into society: ‘a huge and a rather alarming debutante’, according to Jessica. Social life bored her and she had not grown out of the need to draw attention to herself. The only party she enjoyed was a Court ball, where she distinguished herself by stealing Buckingham Palace writing paper. In early 1933, to fill in the months before another Season, she enrolled at a London art school. Diana’s house in Eaton Square was forbidden to the two youngest Mitfords because of the scandal of her divorce and involvement with Mosley, but Unity, freed from parental supervision, was able to call on her sister whenever she liked. On one of her visits she met Mosley and became an instant convert to his ideas. The fascist cause had the attraction of being disapproved of by her parents, as well as providing her with the thrill of being connected to its charismatic leader. For Diana, who at the time was cut off from most of her family, Unity’s enthusiastic support was reassuring.

During the eight years covered by these early letters, Jessica, the second-youngest sister, went from being a cheerful, mischievous eight-year-old to an angry, rebellious adolescent. While there was nothing unusual about this – her sisters had also gone through periods of teenage moodiness – the boredom of home life and the frustration of not being allowed to go to school instilled in Jessica a lasting sense of grievance. Although in her memoirs of 1960, Hons and Rebels, she may have exaggerated the fortress – like aspect of Swinbrook and overlooked the laughter and genuine companionship that existed between herself, Unity and Deborah – whom she likened to ‘ill-assorted animals tied to a common tethering post’ – there is no doubt that life there for the three youngest Mitfords was more circumscribed than Asthall had been for the eldest four. A few months after Diana, who had always been her preferred older sister, left home to get married, twelve-year-old Jessica’s determination to rebel took a tangible form and she opened a ‘running-away’ account at Drummond’s Bank. In her memoirs, she recalled that by this time her social conscience had been awakened by newspaper accounts of the economic depression gripping Britain. She dated her interest in socialism to reading, at the age of fourteen, Beverley Nichols’ pacifist novel, Cry Havoc!, and noted that it was she, not Unity, who first became interested in politics. Nichols’ book was not in fact published until 1933, the year Jessica turned sixteen, by which time Unity had taken up fascism and the struggle between the two ideologies was already being played out on a wider stage than the Swinbrook schoolroom. But no matter which of them was the first to take up an extreme position, Unity and Jessica had, like many sisters, quarrelled relentlessly as children and their political disagreement was in many ways a continuation of earlier squabbles. Beneath their rivalry, however, was a deep and lasting affection which remained intact, even after they had embraced diametrically opposite sides in the conflict of the day.

After their disappointment at her birth – the Redesdales had been hoping for another boy – Deborah was the only one among the sisters never to cause her parents any heartache, and was probably their favourite daughter. She was a contented child with a loving nature, for whom the idea of school was anathema. She was happy so long as she was with the ponies, dogs, goats, guinea pigs and other animals that were as important to her as the human inhabitants of Swinbrook. While she possessed just as passionate and resolute a nature as her sisters, the key to Deborah’s well-adjusted disposition was the ability to accept life as she found it. The youngest of a large family, she soon learnt, as she wrote in a memoir of her childhood, that ‘as everything in life is unfair, perhaps the sooner it is realized the better’, and unlike her politically engaged sisters she never felt the urge to go out and right the injustices of the world. Unencumbered by spite or malice, Deborah possessed a cheerfulness and buoyancy of spirits that never deserted her. As a small child, she worshipped Nancy and sought out her company, only to be teased or treated with amused condescension in return. Her staunchest ally against her eldest sister’s persecution was Jessica; the two remained very close throughout childhood and adolescence, when they shared an easy, happy relationship, expressed through ‘Honnish’ jokes, songs and poems.

My dear Diana,

You must have had an awful time poor dear!¹ Didn’t it hurt most horribly? Anyway I am sure you will be very happy at Bexhill-on-Sea. We have just got the telegram to say that you got there alright, not that I quite see what could have happened to you unless it might have been a train accident. But it is the custom to send telegrams whenever one arrives safely anywhere.

Pat² has arrived, he came at tea time. Mary³ came yesterday and so far no one else has arrived. I do so wish that you were here. You see I feel so stupid because every one invited Togo⁴ to tea on Sunday to play tennis and Mary keeps telling everybody that she has asked him for me and that everybody is to fade away and leave us two together! If you were here you would of course also join in and I should not feel so young. However I shall have to get over feeling shy and this weekend is sure to help me in doing so. I should really much prefer to be at Bexhill with you.

We want to do some table turning one night but we are so afraid that Farve⁵ might find us at it. That would be awful of course.

Much love from Pam

Dearest Ling

Isn’t this too grand?¹

So awful, I ought to be drawing but the professor has been so beastly to me in a piercing voice, everyone heard & I rushed away to hide my shame in the writing room. Very soon I shall have to go back & face my brothers & sisters-in-art.

They are so awful to you, they come up & say What a very depressing drawing, I wonder how you manage to draw so foully, have you never had a pencil in your hand before. They burble on like this for about ½ an hr & everyone else cranes to catch each word. Luckily they are the same to all. I now burst into loud sobs the moment one comes into the room, hoping to soften them.

Very soon it will be lunch time & then I shall be seated between an Indian & a Fuzzy-Wuzzy² degluting sausage & mash oh what a treat. I’m learning Italian here now which I enjoy. In fact I love being here altogether, it’s the greatest fun.

I hope you are in rude health & enjoy your matutinal cold bath.³

So awful, the head of the whole university had us all up the other day & said there is a lady thief among us. I tried not to look self conscious but I’m sure they suspect me. I now leave my old fur coat about everywhere, I long for the insurance money.

Love, Naunce

Dear ould ’Al,

I expect you wonder why I haven’t sent you that Toblerone? Well, you see, it is like this: I bought a 4/6d dove, in a 16/6d cage, which made £1 1s, and I only had £1, so I had to wait two weeks without pocket-money! and so forgot about the toberlerone. But as perhaps you’ll forgive me.

We have started an ‘Industry Club’ and we’ve got a Mag, called the ‘Industries’, and I pronounce it ‘industries’ which annoys Boudle.¹ But I wondered if you’d like it whenever it comes out; and if you would please write and tell me, and I’ll send you one.

Yours fairly affectionately, DYAKE

¹

Darling Cortia,

Thank you SO much for that marvellous little satin bed-coat, it has been my one prideandjoy. Nurse and Nanny² simply love it, too, and actually let me wear it sometimes instead of keeping it up and hoarding it in drawers. I had my stitches out yesterday (one of which I enclose). There were five altogether. Debo has bought one for 6d, I’ve sent one to B. Bamber, a school friend. I’m keeping my appendix in methylated spirits to leave to my children.³

I hope poor little Bryan⁴ is better, give him my love & show him the enclosed stitch. He can have half of it.

Love from Decca

Darling Pam

Oh I am so sorry how beastly for you poor darling.¹ Never mind I expect you’ll be rewarded by marrying someone millions of times nicer & obviously Togo would have been a horrid husband. Are you going to Canada? I hope so, that would be lovely for you.²

Best love & don’t be too miserable, I am, dreadfully, about it but one must make the best of things.

Heaps of love, Naunce

Darling Pam,

Thank you so much for the letter. I am so glad you did not feel sick on the ship. The parrot is very well, and is often let out in the garden. We are going to stay with Diana¹ at Littlehampton a week yesterday, and will probably be there when you get this letter. Nancy is staying in London with a person called Evelyn,² and they will do all their own housework like you and Muv.³

Love from Jessica

Dee Droudled Boudle,

It is rather fun here, but it is a bore having to miss ½ term in London. Debo has been rather cross part of the time. Day before yesterday at lunch she told the maid she wanted ‘a very little ham’, and she was furious with Nanny for saying afterwards she wanted ‘a very, very little ham’. She said ‘What’s the use of my saying I want a very little ham if you go and say I want a very, very little ham?’¹

Yesterday morning, too, she wanted to go out directly after breakfast, but poor Nanny had to go to the lavatory, and Debo was furious again, and said ‘When Muv was here we didn’t have to do all this silly going to the lavatory’. Nanny said very crossly ‘I shall go to the lavatory when I want to’.

Love from DECCA Je Boudle

I swear it’s quite true about the ham & lavatory, don’t believe Debo.

Darling Bods

After 2 hrs solid of thinking I have at last analysed my feelings.

I am in love with H² but as you know the one thing in the world I admire is intellect so I am in the position of someone who is out to marry money & falls in love with a poor man.

I think this is quite the true state of my mind & sounds more sane than my rather hysterical conversation this evening. So frightfully tired.

Love, N

¹

Dear Nancy & Corbish,

Last night I went to a party & danced with M. Chaliapine.² He IS so sweet he jumped about with me and hummed in a sweet voice to the band. I have struck up an acquaintance with his two daughters at the Pontresina Hotel. They are good and nyang [sweet] – aged 8 and 17. It is snowing and a blizerd today.

Love from Decca

Deborah, Tom, Pamela, Unity, Jessica and ‘Muv’, in one of the rare photographs of Lady Redesdale smiling. Pontresina, 1930.

Darling Honkite

We were so excited when Nan woke us up at six o’clock to tell us about Baby G.¹ What is his name? We are coming up to see him as soon as nurse lets us. Won’t it be fun? There isn’t much more to say except to heartily congratulate you!

Much love (and to the baby) from Debo

Darling Bodley¹

Oh I am having such an awful time. First poor little Decca who happily does seem to be more or less all right.² Now today a huge picture of me in the Sunday Dispatch saying that my book³ is dedicated to Hamish who I’m engaged to. And there is the most appalling row going on. Muv & Farve spent the whole morning telling me that my friends are all drunkards, that I’m ruining my health & my character, hinting that I have taken to drink myself. I simply don’t know what to do. They say if I go to London this summer it will be the end of me & I’ve practically promised not to go.

Then dear Uncle George,⁴ to whom I sent an advance copy, has written to Muv saying it’s awfully indecent but he hopes it will sell & I gather Aunt Iris⁵ wrote in the same vein. Farve says it is killing Muv by inches.

Why did I dedicate the beastly book at all, as I said to Muv other people can dedicate books without this sort of thing happening but she & Farve appear to think I did it to annoy them. Then they say that as I’m nearly thirty I ought to stop going out at all. Why? And what should I do if I did stop. I can’t make out what they really want me to do. Live permanently in the country I suppose.

Oh dear I do feel miserable.

Best love, N

Darling Bodley

I am so unhappy for you on account of this terrible tragedy.¹

I can’t help thinking that for her it must have been best, as she didn’t do it on an impulse when he died it shows she must have considered it & decided that life without him was & always would be intolerable. But for you & all her friends it is a terrible loss, I am so so sorry darling.

Please give my love & sympathy to Bryan.

V. best love, Naunce

Darling Nard

I thought I would just write & tell you that I went to court last night & enjoyed it very much, though when I came into the PRESENCE my heart failed me & I was almost too nervous to curtsy, though I managed to in the end.¹ Everyone admired my dress, and it really is too lovely, how can I ever thank you enough, I shall never wear anything else at dances now. I was entirely dressed by you – dress, bag, fur coat, & bracelet. It was great fun waiting in the Mall, we waited about two hours. I shouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much if I hadn’t had such a lovely dress.

Please give my love to Bryan & Tom.²

Best love from Bobo

Unity, ‘a huge and rather alarming debutante’, dressed for presentation at court, 1932.

My Darling Bodley

Thank you for the lovely week I had, I enjoyed myself to the full.

Mitty¹ & I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon discussing your affairs² & are having another session in a minute! He is horrified, & says that your social position will be nil if you do this. Darling I do hope you are making a right decision. You are SO young to begin getting in wrong with the world, if that’s what is going to happen.

However it is all your own affair & whatever happens I shall always be on your side as you know & so will anybody who cares for you & perhaps the rest really don’t matter.

With all my best love, Nance

Darling Naunce

You are divine to me, I don’t know what I would do without you.

I have read your book¹ and it is simply heavenly and beautifully written and I read a lot of it to the Leader² and we laughed so much we couldn’t go on reading.

Bryan has now arrived and is in a state of airy bliss and longing for me to start work on his flat.³ He is in a magnanimous mood and I told him about the stock of country shoes and crepe de chine⁴ I am laying in and he was all for it. He says I can have the pick of Cheyne Walk furniture and in return I am giving him two or three pictures. The future appears to me to be roseate specially now he is so gay and bright.

I ought to get you a diamond necklace – last chance!

All love, Diana

Darling Bodley

Oh I feel as if I were sitting on a volcano (thank you, by the way, a million times for the life saving gift of £5 THE LAST). You know, back in the sane or insane atmosphere of Swinbrook I feel convinced that you won’t be allowed to take this step. I mean that Muv & Farve & Tom, Randolph,¹ Doris,² Aunt Iris, John,³ Lord Moyne⁴ & in fact everybody that you know will band together & somehow stop it. How, I don’t attempt to say.

Oh dear I believe you have a much worse time in store for you than you imagine. I’m sorry to be so gloomy darling.

I am glad you like the book, so do Robert⁵ & Niggy,⁶ it is a great comfort. But so far there’s not been one single review – is this rather sinister? I think I had quite a lot in the first week of H. Fling.

Mitty says £2,000 a year will seem tiny to you & he will urge Farve, as your trustee, to stand out for more.

Do let me know developments, I think it better in every way that I should stay here at present but if you want me at Cheyne Walk I’ll come of course. Only I think I can do more good down here. I wish I felt certain it was doing good though, it would be so awful later to feel that I had been, even in a tiny way, instrumental in messing up your life. I wish one had a definite table of ethics, for oneself & others like very religious people have, it would make everything easier.

Much love always darling, Naunce

Darling Naunce

The detectives are extraordinary and just like one would imagine.¹ It is really rather heavenly to feel that they are around – no pickpockets can approach etc. Isn’t it all extremely amusing in a way. I mean there is such a great army of them and it is all so expensive for Lord Moyne (may he burn in hell).

I have shirked the Grosvenor Place party² because I was advised it would be better not to go. They ALL cried when I wouldn’t & I gave as an excuse ‘Grosvenor Place is such a big house to surround so thought it more friendly to save half a dozen men & stay at home’.

Darling you are my one ally. But it is vastly lying to suggest you encouraged my sot [foolish] behaviour;³ you always said it would end in TEARS.

Do come here soon. I am not hurrying to leave because if Bryan leaves ME the onus is on HIM and so he will.

All love darling, Diana

Darling,

At last a moment to write you – & now my fingers are too cold to hold the pen! Oh the cold is awful, luckily the ’tectives have made themselves an awfully cosy little wigwam outside with a brazier & are keeping themselves warm & happy taking up the road. Bless them.

Saw Bryan yesterday, he was pretty spiky I thought, keeps saying of course I suppose it’s my duty to take her back & balls of that sort. Henry Yorke¹ told him you had gone to Mürren with Cela.² Would I either confirm or deny? I said I thought it very doubtful if Henry knew anything about it & that I would forward a letter to you if B cared to write one.

I may say that the Lambs³ seem to have turned nasty, apparently they told B they were nearly certain you had an affair with Randolph [Churchill] in the spring.

Lunched with Dolly [Castlerosse] & Delly.⁴ Delly said I don’t mind people going off & fucking but I do object to all this free love. She is heaven isn’t she?

I had a long talk with Mrs Mac⁵ who refuses to stay with Bryan. She says you are the one she is fond of. I told her it would mean no kitchen maid but she doesn’t seem to mind that idea at all. You must see her as soon as you get back. B & Miss Moore⁶ both told her (a) you couldn’t afford her & (b) you wouldn’t be entertaining at all, but living in a very very quiet retirement.

Rather wonderful old ladies in fact.⁷

John [Sutro] had a long talk to the Leader & is now won over. Next tease for John, ‘Why even Mosley can talk you round in half an hour’.

Best love darling, Nancy

1 Diana had just had her tonsils out and was convalescing at the seaside.

2 Patrick Cameron; a dancing partner of Nancy and Pamela, and a frequent visitor at Asthall.

3 Mary Milnes-Gaskell; a friend of Nancy from schooldays. Married Lewis Motley in 1934.

4 Oliver (Togo) Watney (1908–65). Member of the brewing family and a country neighbour of the Mitfords. He was briefly engaged to Pamela in 1929. Married Christina Nelson in 1936.

5 David Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale (1878–1958). The sisters’ father believed that Asthall was haunted by a poltergeist, which was one of the reasons he eventually sold the house and built Swinbrook.

1 After much wrangling with her parents, Nancy had been allowed to enrol at the Slade School of Fine Art. She had little artistic talent, received small encouragement from her teachers and left after a few months.

2 University College London, of which the Slade is a part, was the first university in England to welcome students regardless of their race, class or religion.

3 Diana was in Paris learning French and staying in lodgings where the only bath was a shallow tin of water brought to her room twice a week.

1 Unity in ‘Boudledidge’ (the first syllable pronounced as in ‘loud’), the private language invented by Jessica and Unity. This was incomprehensible except to themselves and Deborah who, although she understood it, would never have dared venture on to her older sisters’ territory and speak it.

1 A weekend cottage that Lady Redesdale had rented before the First World War when the Mitfords were living in London. After the war, she bought it and the family lived in it during the Depression while Swinbrook was let.

2 Laura Dicks (1871–1959). The daughter of a Congregationalist blacksmith who went as nanny to the Mitfords soon after Diana’s birth in 1910 and stayed until 1941. Known as ‘Blor’ or ‘M’Hinket’, she provided a steady, loving presence during the sisters’ childhood and was the model for the nanny in Nancy’s novel The Blessing (1951).

‘Blor’, the Mitfords’ much-loved nanny, Laura Dicks. c.1930.

3 In her memoirs, Jessica remembered selling her appendix to Deborah for £1 (£50 today) and that it was later disposed of by their nanny. Hons and Rebels (Victor Gollancz, 1960), p. 39.

4 Bryan Guinness, 2nd Baron Moyne (1905–92). Diana had finally overcome parental opposition and became engaged to Bryan in November 1928. He trained to be a barrister but left the Bar in 1931 when he realized that his wealth was preventing him from being given briefs. His first novel, Singing Out of Tune, was published in 1933, followed by further volumes of poetry, novels and plays. Married to Diana 1929–34, and to Elisabeth Nelson in 1936.

1 Pamela’s engagement to Oliver Watney had been broken off shortly before they were to be married. Pamela was not in love, and Togo was tubercular and probably impotent, but it was a disappointment nevertheless.

2 To help her get over her broken engagement, Pamela accompanied her parents on one of their regular visits to prospect for gold in Canada where Lord Redesdale hoped, in vain, to restore the family fortune.

1 Diana and Bryan had been lent Pool Place, a seaside house in Sussex belonging to Lord Moyne.

2 Evelyn Gardner (1903–94). Married to Evelyn Waugh in 1928. Nancy’s spell as her guest was short – lived; soon after her arrival the two Evelyns separated and later divorced.

3 Sydney Bowles (1880–1963). While they were prospecting for gold, Lady Redesdale and her husband lived in a simple cabin where she did the cooking and cleaning.

1 Lady Redesdale, whose father brought her up according the dietary laws of Moses because he believed they were healthy, forbade her own children to eat rabbit, shellfish or pig. ‘No doubt very wise in the climate of Israel before refrigeration, but hardly necessary in Oxfordshire,’ Deborah wrote in a childhood memoir, Counting My Chickens (Long Barn Books, 2001), pp. 168–9.

Pamela with Lord and Lady Redesdale at ‘the shack’, prospecting for gold in Swastika, Ontario. 1929.

1 Diana and Bryan’s London house.

2 James Alexander (Hamish) St Clair – Erskine (1909–73). Nancy’s unhappy relationship with the flighty, homosexual son of the Earl of Rosslyn was in its second year and although she considered him her fiancé, they were never officially engaged.

1 All the sisters except Nancy and Diana were on a winter holiday with their parents. The Redesdales were both keen skaters and used to take the family to the Oxford ice rink every Sunday. It was once suggested that Deborah should train for the British skating team, a proposal that Lady Redesdale immediately rejected.

2 Feodor Chaliapin (1873–1938). The great Russian operatic bass had left the Soviet Union in 1921 and was based in Paris.

1 Jonathan (Jonnycan) Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne (1930–). Diana’s eldest son became a writer and banker. Author, with his daughter Catherine, of The House of Mitford (1984), a history of three generations of the family. Married to Ingrid Wyndham 1951–63, and to Suzanne Lisney in 1964.

1 When she was a baby, Diana’s head was thought to be too big for her body and was nicknamed ‘The Bodley Head’ by Nancy, after the publishing company of that name.

2 There is no record of what was wrong with Jessica.

3 Nancy’s first novel, Highland Fling (1931).

4 George Bowles (1877–1955). Lady Redesdale’s elder brother was manager of The Lady, the family magazine to which Nancy contributed her first articles. Married 1902–21 to Joan Penn and to Madeleine Tobin in 1922.

5 Iris Mitford (1879–1966). Lord Redesdale’s younger sister was the archetypal maiden aunt, loved by all but very censorious. General Secretary of the Officers’ Families’ Fund, she devoted her life to charitable works.

1 Dora Carrington (1893–1932). The Bloomsbury painter, a friend and neighbour of Diana at Biddesden, had shot herself with a gun that Bryan had lent her to hunt rabbits. Two months previously, Lytton Strachey, the love of Dora’s life, had died aged fifty-one.

1 The London Season opened with a ball at Buckingham Palace at which debutantes were presented to the King and Queen. Unity would have been required to walk up to the royal couple, curtsey twice and retreat backwards gracefully.

2 Thomas (Tom) Mitford (1909–45). The sisters’ only brother, nicknamed ‘Tud’ or ‘Tuddemy’ (to rhyme with ‘adultery’ because of the success his sisters believed he had with married women), was studying to be a barrister in London.

1 Tom Mitford.

2 Diana had told her family that she was planning to leave Bryan.

1 Nancy’s second novel, Christmas Pudding (1932).

2 Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980). Diana’s affair with the leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) had begun earlier in the year. Mosley was married to Lady Cynthia Curzon 1920–33 and to Diana in 1936.

3 Bryan was so distraught by the break-up of his marriage that he could not face the resulting upheaval in domestic arrangements. He asked Diana to pack up their London house in Cheyne Walk and find him a flat.

4 Diana had joked to Nancy that she was going to stock up on ‘a trousseau’ of expensive clothes while she could still afford them.

1 Randolph Churchill (1911–68). Winston Churchill’s only son was related to the Mitfords through his mother, Clementine. He was a great friend of Tom and had a crush on Diana as a teenager. In 1932, he began his journalistic career covering the German elections for the Sunday Graphic. Married to Pamela Digby 1939–46 and to June Osborne 1948–61.

2 Doris Delavigne (1900–42). Beautiful, uninhibited daughter of a Belgian father and English mother. Married the gossip columnist Viscount Castlerosse in 1928.

3 John Sutro (1904–85). Talented mimic, musician and film producer from a well-off Jewish London family. A lifelong friend of Nancy and Diana, he was best man at Nancy’s wedding and Jonathan Guinness’s godfather. Married Gillian Hammond in 1940.

4 Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne (1880–1944). Diana’s father-in-law, a distinguished soldier and politician, was assassinated in Cairo by members of the Stern gang, a Jewish terrorist group.

5 Robert Byron (1905–41). Travel writer whose best-known book, The Road to Oxiana (1937), was a record of his journeys through Iran and Afghanistan. Nancy counted him as one of her dearest friends and mourned him for many years after his death at sea.

6 Nigel Birch (1906–81). A tart and witty friend of Tom who became a Conservative MP after the war. Married Esmé Glyn in 1950.

1 Diana’s father-in-law had hired private investigators to gather evidence that could be used in the divorce hearing.

2 A Christmas party at the Moynes’ London house.

3 The Redesdales and Tom blamed Nancy for supporting Diana’s decision to leave Bryan.

1 Henry Yorke (1905–73). Author, under the pseudonym Henry Green, of nine highly original novels, including Blindness (1926), Living (1929) and Doting (1952). Married Adelaide (Dig) Biddulph in 1929.

2 Lady Cecilia Keppel (1910–2003). A childhood friend of Diana. The Redesdales had asked her to invite their daughter to Switzerland in the hopes that removing her from Mosley would make her change her mind.

3 Henry Lamb (1883–1960). A founder member of the Camden Town Group who had painted a portrait of Diana the previous year. Married, in 1928, to Lady Pansy Pakenham (1904–99).

Diana (right) with her childhood friend Cecilia Keppel in Mürren, Switzerland, 1933.

4 Adele Astaire (1897–1981). Older sister and original dance partner of Fred Astaire with whom she starred on stage until 1932, when she married Lord Charles Cavendish, second son of the 9th Duke of Devonshire and uncle of Deborah’s future husband.

5 The cook at Biddesden.

6 Bryan Guinness’s secretary.

7 At about this time Nancy wrote a privately circulated short story, The Old Ladies, loosely based on herself and Diana. The two old ladies lived in Eaton Square and had a friend, the Old Gentleman, who was based on Mark Ogilvie-Grant.

TWO 1933–1939

Letter from Unity to Diana.

By mid-1933, to all appearances, the three eldest Mitford sisters were settling down. At almost thirty, Nancy had at last reached the end of her affair with Hamish and was engaged to Peter Rodd, a clever, handsome banker, son of the diplomat Lord Rennell, who seemed on the surface a far better prospective husband than Hamish. Pamela was living in a cottage at Biddesden and managing the Guinness farm. Diana’s affair with Oswald Mosley was still regarded with disapproval by her parents, but her divorce from Bryan and the sudden death of Mosley’s wife had weakened the Redesdales’ opposition. The three youngest Mitfords were giving no outward cause for worry. Unity had become a keen member of the British Union of Fascists but this had been kept secret from her parents and they had no reason to suspect her growing fanaticism. Jessica, who was going to Paris for a year to learn French, was about to have her first taste of longed-for freedom. Thirteen-year-old Deborah was content in the Swinbrook schoolroom.

But beneath the deceptively calm surface, personal choices and political events combined to make the years leading up to the war a period of turmoil in the sisters’ lives. Nancy had accepted Peter’s proposal of marriage on the rebound, just a week after Hamish, desperate to extricate himself from their sham engagement, had pretended to be engaged to another woman. Peter, or ‘Prod’ as he soon became known in the family, was no more in love with Nancy than Hamish had been, but, like her, he was nearing thirty and was under pressure from his parents to marry. Peter’s career before meeting Nancy was as inglorious as his record after their marriage: he had been sent down from Oxford and was then sacked or had resigned from a succession of jobs, mostly found for him by his father. He was not only a drinker and a spendthrift, but pedantic and arrogant to boot. For Nancy, however, his proposal came as balm after the humiliation of being jilted by Hamish and she remained blind to his shortcomings. They were married at the end of 1933 and settled in Rose Cottage, a small house near Chiswick, where Nancy, in love with being in love, played for a while at being happy, writing to a friend, with no apparent irony, that she had found ‘a feeling of shelter & security hitherto untasted’. Since Pamela’s engagement to Oliver Watney had been called off, Nancy was now the only married Mitford – a not unimportant consideration as the eldest daughter. It was not long, however, before her determination to be amused by Peter’s inadequacies began to falter and her ability to overlook his unfaithfulness, neglect and over – spending was severely tested. In 1936, they moved into London, to Blomfield Road in Maida Vale, which suited Nancy because it brought her closer to her friends. But with no children – she suffered a miscarriage in 1938 – her marriage was increasingly unhappy.

Nancy could never take politics very seriously. Peter had left-wing leanings and she too became a socialist for a while, ‘synthetic cochineal’ according to Diana. When they returned from their honeymoon Peter and Nancy went to several BUF rallies, bought black shirts and subscribed to the movement for a few months. In June 1934 they even attended Mosley’s huge meeting at Olympia, which must have led Diana to hope that another sister was being won round to the cause. But Nancy was beginning to find Unity and Diana’s fanaticism distasteful. It was not just their political opinions that she disliked, she also deplored the seriousness with which they defended them. The posturing and self-importance that accompanied extremism went against her philosophy that nothing in life should be taken too seriously. Characteristically, she responded with mockery and wrote Wigs on the Green, a novel that satirized Mosley, fascism and Unity’s blind enthusiasm. Its publication in 1935 angered Diana: Mosley and his movement were one area where jokes were unacceptable and she regarded any attack on him as an act of betrayal. She broke off relations with Nancy and the two sisters hardly saw or wrote to each other until the outbreak of war four years later. Unity also threatened never to speak to Nancy again if she went ahead with publication but failed to put her threat into action. Nancy’s letters to Unity, written in the same mocking tone that she used in her novel, betrayed an underlying affection for her wayward younger sister in spite of her aversion to her politics.

Pamela ran the Biddesden dairy farm until the end of 1934. After her broken engagement she had many suitors but formed no deep emotional attachments. John Betjeman, the future poet laureate, proposed to her twice but, although fond of him, she was not in love and turned him down. Her hobby was motoring; she was a tireless driver and made several visits to the Continent in her open-topped car, travelling as far as the Carpathians in Eastern Europe. In 1935, Derek Jackson, a brilliant physicist with a passion for horses, who worked at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford and hunted with the Heythrop hounds in the Cotswolds, began to court her. He had known the Mitfords for some years and, according to Diana, was in love with most of them, including Tom. Pamela was the sister most readily available and he proposed to her. Fifteen – year – old Deborah, who had a crush on Derek, fainted when she heard the news. Pamela and Derek were married at the end of 1936 and set off for Vienna for their honeymoon. On arrival, they were greeted with the news that Derek’s identical twin, Vivian, also a gifted physicist, had been killed in a sleigh-riding accident. Part of Derek died with his brother, who meant more to him than anyone – including Pamela – ever could. Derek’s speciality, spectroscopy, the study of electromagnetic radiation, was, unsurprisingly, a closed book to Pamela and she did not share his interest in painting and literature. Their joint passion was for their four long-haired dachshunds and the dogs may have gone some way towards making up for the children Derek did not want and which Pamela never had. Derek had inherited a large fortune from shares in the News of the World and was a generous man. They settled at Rignell House, not far from Swinbrook, where Pamela’s housekeeping talents made them very comfortable. Pamela’s few letters that survive from this period are written to Jessica, after Jessica’s elopement with Esmond Romilly, and to Diana to thank her for visits to Wootton Lodge, the house in Staffordshire that the Mosleys rented between 1936 and 1939. Derek got on well with Mosley and shared many of his political opinions. Nancy attended Pamela’s wedding but saw little of her until after the war; she did not like Derek and he in turn resented her treatment of Pamela.

In May 1933, Mosley’s 34-year-old wife, Cynthia, died from peritonitis, a month before Diana was granted a divorce from Bryan. Diana records that both she and Mosley were shattered by Cimmie’s unexpected death. Mosley threw himself into building up the BUF, which was growing increasingly militaristic and disreputable in the eyes of the general public, and embarked on an affair with Alexandra (Baba), Metcalfe, his wife’s younger sister. That summer, while the man for whom she had sacrificed so much was on holiday with another woman, Diana received an invitation to visit Germany from Putzi Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s Foreign Press Secretary, whom she met at a party in London. The British press had been criticizing the Nazis’ attacks on the Jews, and the BUF’s anti-Semitic stance was bringing it into conflict with British Jewry. When Diana questioned Hanfstaengl about the German regime’s attitude to Jews, he issued a challenge: ‘You must see with your own eyes what lies are being told about us in your newspapers’. In August, while her two sons – Jonathan was now three and a half and Desmond nearly two – were spending the holidays with Bryan, Diana left for Germany, taking with her nineteen-year-old Unity whose allegiance to Mosley made her a natural ally. Hitler had been elected Chancellor at the beginning of the year and the sisters’ arrival coincided with the annual Nuremberg Party Congress, a four-day celebration of the Nazis’ accession to power. The gigantic parades impressed Diana and demonstrated that fascism could restore a country’s faith in itself. Although Hanfstaengl’s promise of an introduction to Hitler did not materialize on this visit, she saw that links with Germany could be useful for furthering the interests of Mosley, whose career and welfare had now become the centre of her existence. At the end of 1934, with Mosley’s encouragement, she returned to Munich for a few weeks to learn German.

Unity had been in Germany since the spring of that year. She too had been enthralled by the Parteitag parades and her burning ambition was now to meet Hitler, whom she considered ‘the greatest man of all time’. Confident that she would succeed, she persuaded the Redesdales to allow her to live in Munich, where she set herself to learn German so as to be able to understand the Führer when they eventually met. From then until the outbreak of war, Unity lived mostly in Germany. Heedless of the inhumanity of the regime, she embraced the Nazi creed unquestioningly and let it take over her life. Hitler became her god and National Socialism, as she wrote exultantly to a cousin, ‘my religion, not merely my political party’. When she discovered that the Führer often lunched informally at the Osteria Bavaria, a small local restaurant, she started going there daily, sitting at a table where he could see her, and waited to be noticed. In February 1935, her patience was rewarded when Hitler invited her over to his table, spoke to her for half an hour and paid for her lunch. Over the next five years she was to see him more than a hundred times. She was rarely alone with him and, in spite of what has often been speculated, there was no love affair. Just to be in her idol’s orbit was sufficiently intoxicating and gave Unity a sense of importance which led her to imagine that she had a role to play in Anglo-German relations.

Unity spent her first months in Munich lodging with Baroness Laroche, an elderly lady who ran a finishing school for young English girls; she then lodged in a students’ hostel and a succession of flats before moving, in June 1939, into accommodation in Agnesstrasse found for her by Hitler and belonging, she wrote insouciantly to Diana, ‘to a young Jewish couple who are going abroad’. All the other members of the Mitford family, except Nancy, eventually made their way out to Germany. The Redesdales, who had initially disapproved of Nazism, were eventually won round to Unity’s point of view – permanently so in the case of Lady Redesdale.

Diana also met Hitler for the first time in the spring of 1935 and she remained loyal to their friendship for the rest of her life. In her view, the Second World War and its horrific consequences could have been avoided. Of all the sisters, the contradictions in Diana’s character are perhaps the most difficult to reconcile. The latent anti-Semitism and racism of pre-war Britain, assumptions that she never questioned, were at odds with her innately empathetic nature. Her admiration for a barbaric regime, whose essential characteristic was dehumanizing its opponents, jarred with the qualities of generosity and tolerance that led her family and many friends to cherish her. Endowed with originality and intelligence, and priding herself on intellectual honesty, she never acknowledged the reality of Hitler’s criminal aims. While her pre-war sympathy with Nazism can be accounted for by her witnessing the economic transformation of Germany under National Socialism, Diana’s post-war defence of Hitler can be mainly explained by her devotion and undeviating commitment to her husband. Mosley’s links with the Nazis and his opposition to the war brought his political career to an end and led to his and Diana’s imprisonment for three and a half years – years of social ostracism and public vilification during which they were separated from their young children. Diana, who possessed all the Mitford obduracy, sacrificed so much for Mosley that forever afterwards she had to go on defending his cause or admit that the losses and privations she had suffered were for no purpose.

Diana made several visits to Germany before the war and in 1936 she and Mosley were secretly married in the Berlin house of Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler as a guest. Ostensibly the secrecy was to protect Mosley’s political image but the main purpose was to keep the press from discovering the reasons for Diana’s frequent trips to Germany. The British Union of Fascists was in urgent need of funds and, with the help of a member, Bill Allen, who was an advertising magnate, Mosley had developed a scheme to set up a commercial radio station on German soil from which to broadcast to southern England. (No advertising was allowed on British wireless at the time and companies had no means of promoting their goods on the airwave.) Diana’s friendship with Hitler and other Nazi officials placed her in an ideal position to negotiate a deal, but it was essential that the connection between the proposed radio station and Mosley was not made public since the BUF’s unpopularity would almost certainly have led advertisers to boycott the project. It also suited Mosley to keep his marriage secret because he was still carrying on an affair with his sister-in-law. At the end of 1938, Diana successfully obtained Hitler’s agreement to the project and the station would have started broadcasting the following year had war not put an end to the venture. The birth of the Mosleys’ first son, Alexander, in November 1938, coincided with the signing of the contract and precipitated public disclosure of their marriage.

Diana’s closest confidante in the family during this period was Unity and they wrote to each other regularly during the pre-war years. Their correspondence, especially Unity’s, forms the bulk of surviving letters from the late 1930s. Incongruously written in the gushing tones of breathless excitement normally reserved for romantic fiction, the two sisters’ letters about Nazi Germany unavoidably dominate this section.

In the autumn of 1933, sixteen-year-old Jessica and her first cousin Ann Farrer travelled to Paris. Here they attended classes at the Sorbonne and lived with a Madame Paulain who was conveniently lax about chaperoning her charges and allowed the girls to slip out unobserved to nightclubs and the Folies-Bergère. In letters to her mother Jessica was careful not to mention these escapades but she did describe the riots that broke out in Paris following the sacking of the city’s right-wing police chief. She quoted from the communist daily, l‘Humanité, as well as from the Daily Mail, and expressed regret that her quartier had been much too quiet during the unrest. On returning to England, she endured a season as a debutante, a custom that went against her progressive principles but which she confessed to have been ‘rather guiltily looking forward to’. In 1935, Jessica read two more books that influenced her deeply: The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, published in 1933, which detailed the horrors perpetrated after the burning of the Reichstag when communist and other opponents of the Nazis were rounded up, savagely beaten and in some cases murdered; and Out of Bounds: The Education of Giles and Esmond Romilly, written by two rebellious young cousins of the Mitfords. The Romilly brothers were the sons of Clementine Churchill’s sister, Nellie, and nephews by marriage, therefore, of Winston Churchill. Esmond’s contribution to Out of Bounds enthralled Jessica because his attitudes and opinions were so similar to her own. As a schoolboy at Wellington College, Esmond had interrupted Armistice Day commemorations by distributing anti-war leaflets, started a subversive magazine attacking public schools and, aged sixteen, had run away to work in a left-wing London bookshop. Jessica had followed his exploits – the subject of scandalized family gossip – for several years and hero-worshipped her cousin from afar, judging her own revolt against parental authority trivial by comparison.

In early 1937, Jessica and Esmond met by chance at the house of a cousin. Esmond had recently come back from Spain, where he had been fighting with the International Brigades and where he was planning to return as correspondent for the News Chronicle. For nineteen-year-old Jessica, this was the chance to translate her romantic idealism into reality and she begged Esmond to take her with him. They improvised a plan to trick the Redesdales into believing that Jessica was on holiday with friends, drew the money out of her ‘running-away’ account and disappeared to Spain. It was two weeks before their ruse was discovered. Nancy and Peter, to whom it was thought Jessica would be most likely to listen, went out to try to persuade her to come home but the attempt ended in a bitter row. Jessica had made up her mind and she and Esmond were married in Bayonne on 18 May, with Lady Redesdale in attendance. If there was any residual element of playfulness about Jessica’s politics – Nancy used teasingly to call her a ‘ballroom communist’ – it was eradicated by her marriage to Esmond, which also marked the beginning of a hardening in her feelings towards her family. Esmond was not amused by Unity’s friendship with the ‘sweet’ Führer, and although Diana had sided with Jessica over her elopement, Esmond’s hatred of fascism was unconditional.

Jessica’s break with Diana was final and, except in 1973 when Nancy was dying, they did not meet or correspond after 1937. Whenever Unity was in England, however, Jessica would arrange to see her – without Esmond’s knowledge – and although few of their letters from the period have survived, they continued to write to each other up to, and after, the war. That Jessica never broke with Unity as she had done with Diana – Nazism, after all, was no less abhorrent to her than fascism – highlights the complexity of the relations between the sisters. In a letter to her mother, Jessica wrote that she considered Diana a dangerous enemy and the fact that she ‘was once related’ to her made no difference to her feelings, yet in the very same letter she sent her love to Unity. In Unity’s last letter to her parents before she tried to kill herself, she sent ‘particular love’ to Jessica. Perhaps the close ties Jessica and Unity had formed as children were too strong to break, or perhaps Unity’s childishly boastful behaviour masked her sincerity of purpose and meant that Jessica could never take her seriously. Or did Jessica recognize in Unity a fellow zealot whom she could respect, even though they were at opposite ends of the political spectrum? Whatever the reasons, Unity’s espousal of Nazism remained an unsolvable riddle to her sister. ‘Why had she’, Jessica mused, ‘to those of us who knew her the most human of people, turned her back on humanity?’

In February 1939, Jessica and Esmond left for the United States. They had expected a storm of indignation to greet Chamberlain’s signing of the Munich Agreement, which handed over part of Czechoslovakia to Germany, and when it did not materialize the spectre of a completely Nazified Europe no longer seemed remote. Esmond looked to America for a new adventure, somewhere to explore while waiting to see whether Britain would fight. Money difficulties also contributed to their decision to leave the country: they had run up debts on their London flat and were being hounded by bailiffs. When Jessica came into a trust fund of £100 on her twenty-first birthday, rather than pay the bills they decided to spend it on one-way tickets to New York.

For Deborah, alone among the sisters, the sale of Swinbrook in 1936 was a lasting sorrow and spelt an end to what she regarded as an idyllic childhood. Lord Redesdale’s fortunes had not recovered from the Depression and he could no longer meet the cost of maintaining a large house and estate. Although Lady Redesdale had grown fond of the village and enjoyed living in the country, she went along with her husband’s decision. They moved to the Old Mill Cottage on the outskirts of High Wycombe, some thirty miles from London, taking with them Jessica and Deborah, the only two sisters still at home. The picture in the public mind of the Mitfords’ childhood is largely formed by Jessica’s first volume of memoirs, Hons and Rebels, and by Nancy’s novels. Both Jessica and Nancy remembered their childhood essentially as a period of unhappiness and discontent, and their parents as cold and unloving. Deborah had a much easier time than her older sisters; she found Lady Redesdale no stricter than other mothers and was fond of her father. The shock waves sent out by the escapades of her older siblings reached her as distant disturbances and were not sufficient to undermine the security of her well-ordered life, in which lessons with a succession of governesses alternated with long hours in the stable and on the hunting field. There was also a single term at The Monkey Club, a London finishing school from which Lady Redesdale quickly removed her when Deborah told her that it was full of communists. Jessica’s elopement, however, came as a complete surprise and, following closely after the sale of Swinbrook, shook her profoundly. It was a betrayal of the complicity she thought she shared with her beloved childhood companion and it brought an end to their intimacy. Jessica, who envied Deborah’s beauty and her position as their parents’ favourite, never realized how much she had meant to her youngest sister or understood how deeply her disappearance had upset her. To add to Deborah’s distress, the Redesdales forbade her to go to Jessica’s wedding and would not allow her to visit the Romillys when they returned to England. Although Deborah managed to see her sister a few times in secret, the visits were not a success. She did not get on with Esmond, did not like his communist friends, and found being in their company a ‘lowering experience’.

Deborah’s adolescent letters show that she could be quite as sharp and funny as Nancy but without her eldest sister’s spiteful streak. She adopted an apolitical stance early on, partly because she had seen the damage that extremism had inflicted on her family and partly because, unlike her sisters, politics simply did not excite her. When she visited Germany in 1937 and had tea with Hitler, she dismissed him as one of the ‘sights’, and was far more interested in a handsome musician in a band. Like Nancy, she deplored the fact that politics made people lose their sense of the ridiculous and she poked fun at Unity and Diana’s earnest involvement. Deborah looked forward to being a debutante, enjoyed her London Season, and, shortly after her ‘coming-out’ dance in March 1938, fell in love with Lord Andrew Cavendish, younger son of the Duke of Devonshire, to whom she soon became unofficially engaged.

Darling Corduroy,

You really are the most brick like girl I know. Thank you a MILLION times for the divine pound which I found here last night when I arrived back from the Isle of [Wight] nearly crying with tiredness, and I nearly died of joy when I saw the £1 because naturally I thought that the £10 was meant for my birthday you are a brick. We had a lovely time at the Widow’s¹ except that Muv & Debo had to do her knitting for her all the time so that wasn’t too good. Debo found a copy of Farve’s letter² to you in TPOF’s³ bag, poor Corda you do have bad luck, but the worst of the storm of fury fell before you came back, & was braved by Tuddemy,⁴ who softened them both down a heap. Boudy is in top-hole form & has told me all about her semi romance with Putzi,⁵ at least I call it a semi romance.

Idden⁶ & I went on the Sunday school outing to Southsea, & had some romance with (a) a Frenchman who we picked up on the Prom, & (b) two men on a switchback & one of them asked Idden to go to Blackpool with him for a week but I don’t think she’s going. It was fun.

Give my love to TPOL⁷ & Jonathan & Demi⁸ if they are there.

Much love & millions of thanks from Decca

Darling Honks

Thank you SO much for the HEVERN eveninger,¹ Blor was ‘dumfounded’ when Nancy told her what it cost. I honestly never seen anything quite so lovely in all my.

I even forgive you being a fascist for that.

Thanks ever so much.

Best love from Debo

We are having a fine time though very sorry to miss all the fun at home. We hear such dreadful accounts of the weather that we really couldn’t face the journey. Why do people say they don’t enjoy honeymoons? I am adoring mine.¹ You must come out here soon it is wonderful & everyone is so nice & kind.

Best love, NR

Darling Forgery

The book¹ about you is going to be extraordinary, your grandparents who you live with are called Lord & Lady Tremorgan (TPTPOF)² & you are called Eugenia let me know if you would rather not be.

I will finish this later.

Oh deary. Aunt Sport³ came & said some wonderful things & the chiefly wonderful was in Kew. She wanted to find out why her camellia drops its buds, so went up to a gardener & said ‘Good afternoon. Bud dropping by a camellia please?’ The gardener just said ‘Overfeeding’ & went on with his work. It was funny.

Nancy’s engagement to Peter Rodd was announced in July 1933. They were married five months later.

Much love, NR

WRITE

Darling Nard

I’m so dreadfully sorry to hear you are so ill & couldn’t go to the great meeting,¹ I think it’s too awful for you to have missed it. It does sound such heaven. What an outcry in the papers, though! As to Bill Anstruther-Gray,² I’m longing to see him thoroughly beaten up. He does deserve it. Was Nancy at the meeting?

Poor Nard, how awful, your illness costing you such a lot. I do hope you’re better by now, & not in pain. It sounds horrid.

Such a terribly exciting thing happened yesterday. I saw Hitler.³ At about six last night Derek⁴ rang me up from the Carlton Teeraum & said that He was there. Derek was having tea with his mother & aunt, & they were sitting just opposite Him. Of course I jumped straight into a taxi, in which in my excitement I left my camera which I was going to take to the shop. I went & sat down with them, & there was the Führer opposite. The aunt said ‘You’re trembling all over with excitement’, and sure enough I was, so much that Derek had to drink my chocolate for me because I couldn’t hold the cup. He sat there for 1½ hours. It was all so thrilling I can still hardly believe it. If only Putzi had been there! When he went he gave me a special salute all to myself.

Do write & tell me whether or not you think Olympia was a success? Does the Leader think so? I suppose all these absurd attacks in the papers are bound to do the Party a certain amount of harm. The accounts in the German papers were marvellous.

I do love hearing stories about the kits⁵ in your letters, do always tell me if they say anything funny.

With best love from Bobo

Darling Nard

Thank you so much for your letter, & the cutting about Tilly’s divorce.¹ I’m so glad Edward won, although I hardly know him, because I do think she was a little brute to say such horrid things about him.

Thank you so much too for sending me the cutting about Putzi² – I never see the Express here. I wonder if it’s true or if the Express put it in out of spite – I should think it is probably true, it’s just the sort of thing Putzi would do. Members of the Party are furious about it & I don’t wonder, they don’t like their high-up members making themselves ridiculous abroad. I saw to it that the cutting was shown all round the Brown House.³ I hope Putzi is coming back in about a fortnight, or even sooner, I hope he won’t bring Miss Olive Jones here, I would be cross.

The excitement here over the Röhm⁴ affair is terrific, everyone is horrified. No-one knew about it until last night. I heard rumours after dinner & immediately went into the town, where there were printed accounts of it stuck up in the chief squares. I couldn’t believe it at first. I went to the Brown House, but the street was guarded by SS men so I couldn’t get near. I waited in a huge crowd in a square near for two hours, they were all waiting to see Hitler & Goebbels⁵ come away from the Brown House. While we stood there several huge columns of SS, SA & Stahlhelm marched past us to the Brown House, & huge lorries full of sandbags with SS or Reichswehr sitting on top, & there were SS men dashing about the whole time on motorbikes & cars. It was all very exciting. Then word was passed round that Hitler & Goebbels had left by a back entrance & were already flying to Berlin, so I came home. Today no-one can talk of anything else, & there is a rumour that Schleicher⁶ & his wife, Röhm & Heines⁷ have all killed themselves. I wonder if it is true. I am so terribly sorry for the Führer – you know Röhm was his oldest comrade & friend, the only one that called him ‘du’ in public. How anyone could do what Röhm did I don’t know. It must have been so dreadful for Hitler when he arrested Röhm himself & tore off his decorations. Then he went to arrest Heines & found him in bed with a boy. Did that get into the English papers? Poor Hitler. The whole thing is so dreadful. I must now go into the town & find out what has happened since last night.

With best love to you & the Kits & Nan from

Bobo

Darling Nancy

Thank you ever so for your letter. How lovely, are you really going to give a party when I get back? I hope it will be as lovely as the one before I went. I actually return next Thursday the 19th, but have to go straight to Swinbrook, and please give me time to have my one-&-only evening dress altered by Gladys¹ so it fits me, otherwise I couldn’t possibly come. So could it be about 1½ weeks after my return?

Now seriously, about that book.² I have heard a bit about it from Muv, & 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, as from the date of publication. And as for the article in the Vanguard³ I’m furious about it. You might have a little thought for poor me, all the boys know that you’re my sister you know.

The Passion Play⁴ was very long. So was the opera we went to last night. It’s fun having TPOF & Decca & Ann [Farrer] here, only TPO isn’t in a very good temper. I am though.

You must come to Swinbrook when I get back, as you will be wanting to see my 304 postcards of the Führer I’m sure. Poor sweet Führer, he’s having such a dreadful time. Well now I must go. But I must tell you one thing first. You see there is a monument in the town to the Nazis who were shot down in 1923, & everyone must salute while they pass it. I took the old Fem⁵ past it once & she wouldn’t salute, & the next time we passed it she went round a different way alone. So to pay her out, Decca & Ann & I dashed for a tram, & went home, & left her in the town quite lost & not being able to speak a word of German & that was in the morning, & poor old girl she didn’t find the way back until dinner time! Wasn’t it a good pay-out.

Heil Hitler! Love Bobo

P.S. No I didn’t fumble with Röhm at the Brown House. He preferred men you know.

Darling Honks

Could you possibly send the belt of the wonder gown as I’m going to wear it soon. I expect you heard the story of me leaving school after two days.¹ I had to see the headmistress for two hrs and she lectured me about stone walls not making a prison, and I said of course not if you’ve got a horse that’ll jump them. She was furious.

Best love from Debo

I argue for fascism at school as all the girls are Conservatives. Please tell Mr. Maize.²

Darling Eugenia Fitzforgery (& Bodley)

Tell Bodley I couldn’t go to the case¹ as my car is quite smashed up again & we are frightfully in the dee pend in many ways. We fear we shall have to do without a car in fact. But it appeared the Lead was a wonderful witness, everyone is talking about it & as the case has been reported in full & as he has managed to make nearly all of ‘the speech’ during the course of it, I expect it will do the Party a heap of good.

I met a friend of Serge² last night, she says the whole summer Serge was madly in love with Woman [Pamela]. So it looks as if the old thing didn’t play her cards very well.

The book is getting along – 34,000 words so far with 60,000 to do so only another 17,000. It is funnier than it was because there is more about E.U.G.E.N.I.A. – Eugenia.

Well do come home soon oh do.

My best love to Nard & you, NR

Darling Birdie

Oh what a thrill! The Hill Top¹ is coming to the dance – at least I hope he is. I took great care to see that he was asked. I am really dying for it because it has been so dull and AWFUL.

This is what I am giving to Filthy Rodd for Xmas

They are links called ‘road to ruin’ and are ballet girls, cards, drink and racing. I am giving Tuddemy a pair of 6d Woolworth little boy’s shorts with an opening in front and nothing to do it up with!!

Best love from Dawly

Darling Bird

I have a French gov this afternoon who, since she has seen her, has never stopped raving over the beauties of Diana. If one mentions Muv, she says ‘Et la fille!’ meaning Diana, or if you mention Decca she says, ‘Et la soeur!’, or Jonathan she says ‘Et la mère!’ It makes Muv say Orrhhn when she flatters all of us!!! She thinks you look like heaven from your photograph.

Best love from Dawly

Darling Boud

See! I write to you – !

Your Boud¹ read Wigs on the G. & said that it quite inclined her to join the movement. I swear that’s true. So please don’t stone up or

Where brain should be – bone

Where heart should be – stone

will sum you up all too truly.

I went over to see Penelope Betjeman² & her German maids were thrilled to see the Sister of One who knew Hitler & asked me a lot about him. I told them about how wonderful he is & all about Hannibal³ & they sent him a post card for his birthday. When they heard that I know Mrs Wessel⁴ quite well too they were beside themselves with delight & excitement. I told them I would try & get a lock of her hair for them.

What d’you think I have found in a Witney curio shop? A church, about eighteen inches high & with a steeple about two foot made entirely of white quills & pins. It is wonderful & you would absolutely adore it. We thought you might make one of brown quills just like the B House. The doors, Gothic windows, & even a clock in the tower are really marvellous & all for 30/–(in a glass case). I am too poor alas to buy it.

Tom has been awful, disappointing Farve by not coming, & resultant tempers very distressing for all.

I go back to Rose Cot on Fri but shall soon be coming over to see

Head of Bone

Heart of Stone

So au revoir till then

Love, NR

Darling Nard

The last two days have been wonderful. On Tuesday evening Muv & Miss Fenwick¹ & I went to your hated Platzl,² they loved it, I came away in the middle & went to the Osteria, & the Führer was there.³ He sent Brückner⁴ to invite me to his table, & I went & sat next to him, & on my other side was Gauleiter Forster of Danzig, who was very nice & invited me to visit Danzig. The Führer was sweet & stayed a long time & talked a lot about all these Notes.⁵ He said he would like to see Muv. The next day (yesterday) Brückner came to the Osteria to invite us to tea with the Führer at the Carlton at 6. We went, & there he was, and he said I must be interpreter, but as you can imagine it was very embarrassing as no-one could think of anything to say. After a bit, when Werlin⁶ came, the conversation warmed up a bit. Muv tactfully went away after about an hour, I stayed on & after that of course all went swimmingly, he stayed until ¼ to nine. Of course it was bound to be embarrassing with Muv, as she can’t speak German, that is always rather a wet blanket. Whenever I translated anything for either of them it always sounded stupid translated. On Tuesday by the way he asked after you, & sent you Grusses [greetings]. I do hope you will come soon Nardy, don’t forget to. I fear the whole thing was wasted on Muv, she is just the same about him as before. Having so little feeling she doesn’t feel his goodness & wonderfulness radiating out like we do, & like even Farve did. She still says things like ‘Well I’m sure he is very good for Germany, but’ and then she enumerates the things she disapproves of. The most she will admit is that he has a very nice face. She is going back to England this evening.

Collage of Hannibal crossing the Alps made by Unity for Hitler’s birthday.

Last night I went out with Stadelmann,⁷ he also sent you many greetings. He has been skiing & is dark brown, can you imagine it.

Do write soon & tell me all about what it is like where you are. And DO come soon to Munich.

Heil Hitler!

Best love from Bobo

Darling Nard

I got your letter yesterday but couldn’t answer it at once as Tom didn’t go until last night, and as you know when there is someone here one never has a moment. I think he enjoyed his stay, the heat was terrific the whole time. We lunched with the Führer twice – Saturday & yesterday – and although I didn’t want him to meet him I am quite pleased now.¹ He adored the Führer – he almost got into a frenzy like us sometimes, though I expect he will have cooled down by the time he gets home – and I am sure the Führer liked him, & found him intelligent to talk to. So really I think no harm is done, though on Saturday as we went to his table my heart sank. If it hadn’t been for the Führer’s sudden habit of lunching early it would never have happened.

Did you like Ribbentrop?² Did he remember me? He was at Berchtesgaden with the Führer for the week-end.

Tom Mitford, from Unity’s album. Munich, 1936.

Tom quite loved the Good Girl,³ yesterday we took her out to a café. They had a long argument – though of course GG took no notice of his arguments – and GG has requested him to keep her informed, on postcards, about the relations between America, Japan, Russia & Europe!

Heil Hitler!

With best love from Bobo

Darling Corduroy,

Many Happy Returns of the Day. I’m sorry this present is so beastly. I got it (as usual) at The Little Shop.¹

You are lucky to have been out to Germany to see my hated Boudle. Did she write & tell you how she saw the Führer, of whom she writes as ‘Him’ with a capital H, as for Christ or God!! I love my Boud in spite of all.

Love from Decca

Darling Bodley

My book comes out on the 25th inst:, & in view of our conversation at the Ritz ages ago I feel I must make a few observations to you.

When I got home that day I read it all through & found that it would be impossible to eliminate the bits that you & the Leader objected to. As you know our finances are such that I really couldn’t afford to scrap the book then. I did however hold it up for about a month (thus missing the Spring list) in order to take out everything which directly related to Captain Jack, amounting to nearly 3 chapters & a lot of paragraphs. There are now, I think, about 4 references to him & he never appears in the book as a character at all.

Diana and Jessica in 1935, two years before politics separated them for ever.

In spite of this I am very much worried at the idea of publishing a book which you may object to. It completely blights all the pleasure which one ordinarily feels in a forthcoming book.

And yet, consider. 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.

The 2 or 3 thousand people who read my books, are, to begin with, just the kind of people the Leader admittedly doesn’t want in his movement. Furthermore it would be absurd to suppose that anyone who was intellectually or emotionally convinced of the truths of Fascism could be influenced against the movement by such a book.

I still maintain that it is far more in favour of Fascism than otherwise. Far the nicest character in the book is a Fascist, 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 a little 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.

Personally I believe that when you have read the book, if you do, you will find that all objections to it except perhaps the last (that my particular style is an unsuitable medium) will have disappeared.

On darling I do hope so!

Always much love from NR

Darling Stony-heart

We were all very interested to see that you were the Queen of the May this year at Hesselberg.¹

Call me early, Goering dear.

For I’m to be Queen of the May.²

Good gracious, that interview you sent us, fantasia fantasia. 5 July. I have been too busy in the giddy social whirl to finish this but will do so now – or never.

We are off to Amsterdam tomorrow so shall be nearer to you in body if not in spirit. By the way aren’t you going abroad, to England, quite soon. Well then I shan’t bother to send this to the nasty land of blood baths & that will save me 1d.

We were asked to stay with somebody called Himmler or something, tickets & everything paid for, but we can’t go as we are going to Venice & the Adriatic for our hols. I suppose he read my book & longed for a good giggle with the witty authoress. Actually he wanted to show us over a concentration camp,³ now why? So that I could write a funny book about them.

We went to Lord Beaverbrook’s⁴ party last night, it was lovely & I told him about how Goering called you early & he roared.

I must say you are a wonderful noble girl, & everyone who has read my book longs to meet you.

Well, I hope to see you when we get back from Amsterdam.

Love from your favourite sister, NR

Darling Cord

I was sad to hear about your accident,¹ you can’t think how sorry we all were. I do hope you’re better now & not in too much agony, it sounded too frightful, poor Cord, having stitches in while you were still conscious (at least that’s what Farve said, I hope it wasn’t true).

All the Farrers wrote & sent you their love & sympathy.

Have you had any results from the chain letter yet, I’ve had about 3/–I think which, after all, although it isn’t exactly £312 isn’t too bad for 6d is it.

Much love from Decca

Darling Forge

This is to wish you many happy returns of your 21 birthday. I hope you will have a lot of lovely presents, & enclose a miserable cheque to buy yourself some pretty little Nazi emblem with.

Well much love from NR

¹

Darling Boud

I’ve saved up £4 towards the Tour,² it’s in the bank, I expect to add another £6 at the end of the month. When shall we go? About the beginning of October do you think? Also are we definitely going?

This is the new Honnish poem (to be pronounced in true Honnish)³

For into bed she sped

And in her bed she read

And while she read

A lump of lead

Fell on her head in bed.

Well Boud, write soon to your old Boud who loves her Boud in zbeed udj al⁴ and it’s in zbeed of a good deal.

P.S. I went to see poor Cord after her operation, she looked terribly ill. I kept nearly having to leave the room because she and Muv would keep talking about an awful thing called the after-birth.⁵

Darling Nard

I’m afraid you must have had an awful journey. Even I, travelling only as far as here, was frozen when I arrived; and when I woke up yesterday morning and heard the wind whistling I thought of your poor crossing.

Well now I have a lot to tell you. Yesterday about 12, on my way to the hairdresser, I was walking up the Ludwigstrasse & just going to cross one of the side streets & there was a large Merc in it waiting to be able to cross the Ludwigstrasse & to my astonishment in front sat the Führer. I stood for about ½ a minute saluting about 5 feet from him, but he didn’t see me. When I got to the hairdresser I felt quite faint & my knees were giving, you know how one does when one sees him unexpectedly. But I was so pleased, because it was the first time I had seen him like that, quite by chance, in the street. Hardly any of the other people recognised him.

I went to the Osteria, & found Erich¹ & Heemstra² & Micky³ there, I made them sit in the garden & I sat alone inside. He came about 2.30, & smiled wonderfully as he shook hands, but then I waited & waited & no-one came. I was in despair, I thought he wasn’t going to ask me. Rosa⁴ came & told me she had heard he wasn’t in at all a good mood, so then I thought he certainly wouldn’t invite me. However at last, at about 3, Brückner came & asked me to go to him. I feel sure the Führer had pains,⁵ which I know he sometimes does have. For one thing he didn’t stand up when I came to the table, which he always does. Also the skin round the outside corners of his eyes was yellow. And then he couldn’t seem to keep still, he moved backwards & forwards the whole time, with his hands on his knees, you know how he does. I was so unhappy about it, it is so terrible to think of him being in pain. However he was in the most divine mood imaginable, I think he was almost sweeter yesterday than I have ever known him. We talked a lot about the Parteitag, he was terribly pleased at the way it had all gone off. He said he felt terribly flat now that it’s all over, & that it was so depressing driving away from Nürnberg, a few people in the street for about 100 yards & then no-one. I explained to him why that was, that they all thought he was going to the Flughafen [airport] and I think that cheered him up, but he was sad that the people had waited so long & hadn’t seen him. He told me where we had sat at both the Congresses, and said he had seen me at the opera, but of course that was you. He put his hand on my shoulder twice & on my arm once. I told him about having to go to Paris, & he was sorry for me, but then he said ‘But in Paris you will see real Life, and then Munich will seem like a rocky island to you’. (He said the word ‘island’ in English.) I said no, Munich will always be my Paradise.

Now Nardy I am going to tell you a thing that will make you so jealous. We came to speak of the English National Anthem, and he whistled it all the way through. Wasn’t it wonderful. Hoffmann⁶ showed him a book of photos of him (Hoffmann) as a child, in different costumes – artist, soldier, sailor etc – and the Führer simply roared. I must say, although I don’t much like Hoffmann now, he was a most divine looking & lovely child, even at about 14. There were only Brückner, Dietrich,⁷ Hoffmann & the Doctor [Goebbels] at the table, & Dietrich left half-way through. After a bit the Führer sent to see if he was telephoning, but they said he had gone, and the Führer said quite sadly ‘einfach weggelaufen’.⁸ You would have loved him when he said that. Apparently he talked to Lord Rennell⁹ on Tuesday, and was full of praise of him. He was very surprised to hear he is a sort of relation of ours. He thinks he is wonderful. I asked him to sign my belt, and he laughed like anything, he didn’t do it very well but you can see it. I think it is the first time he has ever signed a belt. I have definitely arranged to go to Berlin in November, and he is going to take me on the Wannsee in Dr Goebbels’ ship. There was no one else in the garden except Erich & co & one old woman, who presently came up to the Führer & with a trembling voice asked if she might greet him, she had never seen him & this was the second time she had come all the way from Dresden to see him, the first time she hadn’t succeeded. He stood up & gave her his hand & she said ‘God bless you mein Führer. This is the schönster Augenblick meines Lebens’.¹⁰ Then she was so overcome she went away, but he called her back to sign a postcard she had in her hand. It was really wonderful. He asked where you were, & whether you were coming back. Have you sent your letter? I wrote one & sent it, I do hope he will understand what I mean, I think he will.

Well Nardy this letter is already far too long, so now I will stop. But I thought you would like to hear some of the little details of my lunch with the Führer.

I do hope your journey wasn’t too bad. Please give my love to all Kits.

V Best love, German greetings & Heil Hitler!

Bobo

²

Darling Cord,

I did mean to write ages ago but somehow time really flew.

It is so lovely being in Paris again, we are all enjoying it terrifically, specially me. Do try & get the Boud not to come as I don’t think she’d like it, one doesn’t want a really huge wet blanket in such a small flat.

Cordy it was kind of you to lend me that beautiful fur, it’s naturally made the whole difference to the coat.

We went to Molyneux dress show, where we saw several lovely things, and we are going to Worth’s & Vionnet’s if the Fem can get a card for that one. Yesterday we went to tea with Princess F Lucinge,² she is a spamp³ I must say, & her house is too fascinating & wonderful for words.

Are you coming to Paris soon? You did say so. Nancy’s coming on the 25th for a bit. Hm.

Muv saw in the papers that the filthy old Boud has been putting posters in people’s cars saying ‘The Jews take everything, even our names’ (it didn’t actually say Boud, but of course we guessed).

Didn’t it seem awful & in a way unnatural Lady A.S. & the Duke of⁴ having rose petals sprinkled over them. I see it said in the Tatler, ‘PART of the h.moon is bound to be delightful as it’s being spent in hunting country’. Well Cord goodbye, I DO hope you will SOON come.

Much love from Decca

Dee Droudled Boudle,

Well here I am back again. What agony to leave Paris. You can’t think what a lovely time we had, but still I am thrilled for my dance which is fairly soon. I do think you might come back for it. I gave Diana a present for you, I am afraid it’s beastly & anyhow I hope you will throw it from you with disgust as it was made by enemies of Germany.

This is the new Boud song, Id¹ came in to my room in Paris one day & found me singing it to myself. I will write it in English as it is easier to understand & takes up less space.

I went down to St James’ infirmary

I saw my Boudle there

Stretched out on a long white table

So cold so beastly so fair

I went up to see the doctor

‘She’s very low’, he said;

I went back to see my Boudle

Good god!!! She’s lying there DEAD Let her go, let her go, God bless her; Wherever she may be She can search the whole world over And never find a sweet Boud like me.

It has actions, too.

We are going to see Womb [Pamela] today, & stay there a night. Diana has given me a HEAVENLY evening dress.

Give her my love, & hate to Hitler

Lodge Vrudub, Je Boudle²

Darling Nard

I must write again, because such a lot seems to have happened since I wrote.

Firstly DO write & say when you are coming. Everyone keeps asking. I will get you a room here when I know.

I didn’t expect to see the Führer, as he apparently hasn’t been to the Osteria for weeks. However today at last he came, it was wonderful, & he was tremendously surprised to see me. He immediately asked me, as he came in (himself, for the first time), to go & sit with him. A bit later Max Schmeling¹ came with Hoffmann, & sat on the Führer’s other side. He remembered you & me from the Parteitag. The Führer was heavenly, in his best mood, & very gay. There was a choice of two soups & he tossed a coin to see which one he would have, & he was so sweet doing it. He asked after you, & I told him you were coming soon. He talked a lot about Jews, which was lovely. News from Abyssinia & Egypt kept on coming through on the telephone, which was rather exciting. The Führer stayed in the Osteria for two hours, wasn’t it lovely. After he went Werlin drove me to see his new shop, which is wonderful.

The most amazing piece of news of all is – Baum² is out of the Partei! She was in the Osteria yesterday, & Rosa told me. According to Stadelmann she was discovered to be a half-Jüdin [Jewess]. Isn’t it amazing. She also hasn’t any work poor thing, as there was a big row in her Mütterheim at Starnberg & she was kicked out. I am really sorry for her, as the Partei & her hate for the Jews were really all she had.

This evening I went to the Christmas party in Hössl’s³ Clinic, it was terribly pathetic, with all the little lupus-faced children dressed up as angels. The grown-up patients were very pathetic too. I think you would have hated it. The head doctor rushed up to me & thanked me profusely for all my kindness to the children, I felt awful as all I have ever done is to club with Armida & Rosemary⁴ & send them a Prinz-Regenten-Kuchen [cake]. So I sent them another today. Hössl, of course, sends you best love. He walked all the way home with me this evening, & I must say he is sweet.

Luckily Stadelmann has got hols now, so he stays around most of the time as a sort of Adjutant. Erich comes to-morrow evening.

Come SOON.

With best love & Heil Hitler! Bobo

Darling Nard

Yesterday the Führer was in the Ost, he came about 3 & left at 5 & was in a wonderful mood, quite different from last week. He told me that Lord & Lady Londonderry & the youngest daughter¹ had visited him in the Reichskanzlei last week. I felt bound to say that I was horrified that he should receive such people, and that he would soon find that practically all his English acquaintances were in concentration camps. He also admitted to having seen Beaverbrook, which horrified me even more. You know Nardy he must have a very bad adviser as to which English people he receives. I think this time it wasn’t Ribbentrop. After all, he isn’t like an ordinary politician, who has to receive anyone who is important. Visits to him should be reserved for those who have deserved it, by doing something for his cause or at any rate for really loving him, regardless of titles & money & importance, don’t you think. I mean, to my mind it would have been much better to receive your Mrs Newall,² who really does adore him, than Lady Londonderry, who will simply go back & say just as nasty things as ever. If they want to get on the right side of some important person, they should take them to see Hess³ or Goebbels or Goering or anyone, but not the Führer. We talked about it quite a lot, and he seemed to understand. Of course it’s impossible for him to know whom to receive, but he should be better advised. However he said that to make up for it, whenever you & I are in Berlin, he will give an ‘Abend [evening]’ for us in the Reichskanzlei. So that is lovely, isn’t it. We must go. He said he had never seen such jewels as Lady L wore.

He talked a lot about England & Germany, & said that in 2 years time the German army will be the strongest, not only in Europe but in the WORLD. Isn’t it wonderful. And he said that with the German army & the English navy we could rule the world. Oh if we could have that, and what wouldn’t be worth doing to help the cause of friendship between the two countries even a little.

He is going to invite Mary⁴ & me to tea in the Wohnung [flat] tomorrow, isn’t it wonderful. To a ‘kleine Gesellschaft’.⁵ Herr & Frau Hoffmann were also at lunch yesterday, & he invited them too. I am thrilled. And Oh Nardy, what do you think, he mentioned his SISTER.⁶ Wasn’t it thrilling. He said he had wanted to send for her to come to Munich, but couldn’t get hold of her. I am so miserable, because if she had been in Munich PERHAPS she would have come to the kleine Gesellschaft.

The curse came today, & I have a pain, thank god it didn’t come tomorrow. Mary is in a quandary as she hasn’t anything to wear. I shall wear my white fur blouse & black skirt.

Tonight is the Osteria Faschings ball, it is wonderfully decorated. Hess & Frau are going to the 2nd one. Now I must scram. Do write soon, & we must go to Berlin.

With best love & Heil Hitler! Bobo

¹

Darling Birdie

Thanks ever so much for the postcard.

I am here quite alone except at weekends which gets rather boring. My gov is quite nice and I haven’t done any arithmetic since she came (don’t tell Muv) I can’t imagine why.

I don’t think Decca is enjoying her season much but don’t tell Muv.

Are you excited for the Cruise thing we’re going on?² I’m not because we’re probably going to Greece and there are going to be lectures on the Greek one which I’m not going to attend if I can help it. I hate lectures. Besides, I thought the whole point of a cruise was the romance on it, not lectures. I shall be having romance while you and the others go to the beastly lectures.

Love from Dawly

Deborah, 1936.

¹

Dearest Cheerless,

Thank you for your letter dear, it was quite funny in parts. But poor young gelding what a dull time you must be having. When are you scramming to Scotland?

Everyone in our party has gone from here except us & the slavers.² The male slaver has taken a terrific hate on me because I told him a lot of lies. Yesterday we went to an extraorder nightclub in a town near here, run by an ex-Folies Bergère lady called Popo (or Pot-pot perhaps). And there are notices on the walls saying things like ‘Popo a soixante ans, elle est garantie pour cent.’³ And she did a dance & took off her jersey. Wasn’t it extraorder. And then she waltzed with Mary Sewell. Nancy didn’t come because she thinks nightclubs boring, & the Sewells (evidently) thought it was because she was shocked by them, & on the way home kept saying ‘I wonder what NANCY would have thought of it!’ Wasn’t it killing.⁴

I got a ’gram this morning saying I can’t go down the Danube with Tom & Boud, will you tell whoever sent it it was j.n. or jolly nice of them to spend an extra 5d on saying ‘very sorry’?

There are some lousy people called the Grevilles here & the other day they asked Chris & me to go on a picnic with them. But when the time came they simply went without us, wasn’t it rude of them. So we pretended to the others that we had been on the ’nic & that it was heaven with champagne & everything. But when I saw the slaver’s killing old père de famille-ish face believing it all I couldn’t contain my giggles so it all came out. So the s. was simply horrified at me telling such a lie & he said his faith in human nature was shaken. So now we’re always telling him lies like ‘we saw two people fall out of a boat this morning’ & then he says ‘did you really’ & we say ‘no!’ It teases like mad.

Love from Tarty

Dear Bird

Would you send me a letter with a German stamp & an Olympic Games stamp on it like you sent to Muv because Sex Hay¹ longs for one. DON’T FORGET.

I’ve started a new National Movement & its slogan is FOOD & DIRT. That’s what we stand for. There are 3 members. It started with Peter Ramsbotham² & me & then Sex joined.

It’s called Nourishilism.

It’s a very swell movement.

Goodness the weather.

What a silly muddle about the Danube thing. Poor old Squalor will be disappointed again I suppose.³ The whole family is abroad except me. Typical.

Jaky⁴ sends his love.

Sex has been staying here. Ivan⁵ has got a job about anti-aircraft intelligence at the Home Office. Isn’t it killing, I mean the intelligence bit. I’m afraid poor England will be beaten in a war if we have Ivan as chief.

Isn’t it wicked about the bombing of the Alhambra. If only all the Spaniards could be converted to Nourishilism it would never have happened. THE BRUTES.

Well DON’T FORGET about the Olympic stamp.

Hail Food!

Hail Dirt!

Hail our leader Ramsbotham!

Yours in National Nourishilism, Dawly

Diana with Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister; Heinrich Hofmann, Hitler’s official photographer; and Albert Speer, the Reich’s chief architect. Haus Wahnfried, Bayreuth, 1936.

Darling:

I have so much to erzähl [tell] and as I can’t sleep I have got up to erzähl it. When I arrived here I felt so ill that I went to bed and took a lot of aspirin, and then I rang up Magda¹ and arranged to meet her the next morning, and I rang up the Kit² and told him about everything being put off.³ Next morning Bill⁴ came round, and then he left and Magda and I took all the papers and went to the police etc. While we were talking she happened to let it out that the Führer was in Berlin, but she added it would be impossible to see him because he was just off to the manoeuvres. Then she rang up Brückner and said she would like to talk to the Führer for a minute about my affair. We went shopping to get her clothes for Greece and while she was trying on a message came, would she ring Brückner up. She only did so an hour later, it was pure agony because I kept thinking the Führer would have scrammed. However we were asked to go round at 7.30, and in the end we stayed for dinner and saw a lovely film with Lillian Harvey.⁵

But now I must tell you how sweet the Führer was. He came into the room and made his beloved surprised face, and then he patted my hand and said ‘Es hat mir so eine Freude gemacht, dass Sie sind zum Parteitag gekommen und jeden Tag im Kongress gewesen sind’⁶ or words to that effect, and he was so wonderful and really seemed pleased we had gone every day, and he said specially to the Schlusskongress, so I said we had been freuing [enjoying] ourselves over that the whole week. He asked after Tom and I said ‘Der Judenknecht is fast National-sozialist geworden’⁷ and he roared with laughter and said ‘Ihr Bruder ist ein fabelhafter Junge’⁸ twice over. Isn’t Tom lucky. Then I said we loved the wonderful parades and he said it was the best Parteitag he had ever had because everything had geklappt [worked]. He had noticed Janos.⁹ He sent you his love; and darling everything is arranged for the 6th, and it is to be in Schwanenwerder¹⁰ and the Führer is giving up his day to it and everything is to be done without Joan Glover¹¹ I am so happy now because it all seemed to be hopeless without talking to the Führer first, but now it is all perfect, and not too late for you, is it? I terribly want to bring J[onathan] & D[esmond] over, what do you think? They needn’t know what is going on but I would so love them to be blessed by a glimpse of the Führer. He has gone off last night to the manoeuvres at Kiel or somewhere. He looks in blooming health & his skin is peeling from so much sun.

All love darling, Nardy

Magda is being an angel, and she can talk of nothing but your marvellous attack on Joan Glover and how pleased they all were with you for doing it, that day you know.

Darling

I am sitting in a bower of orchids envying you, because I expect you are still in the Führer’s train. Yesterday was the loveliest and at the same time the most terrible day for me. The wedding itself was so beautiful, and the blick [sight] out of Magda’s window of the Führer walking across the sunny garden from the Reichskanzlei was the happiest moment of my life. I felt everything was perfect, the Kit, you, the Führer, the weather, my dress, Magda, the Standesbeamter [registry clerk], the Doktor, and even Bobbie¹ and Bill [Allen]. The Führer’s orchids and Widemann’s roses, and the Kit’s orchids, and the ceremony, and the Führer’s wonderful present,² and the drive to Schwanenwerder, and the wonderful essen [food], and Magda’s and your sweetness, and Maria’s³ sweetness too; and then your present and the detective reading a detective novel, and the Standesbeamter’s heart beating so loud because he was so happy to see the Führer; but in any case, I could write for ever about that part of the day.

The other part I cannot describe, how they spoilt the meeting for me, and made me late for dinner at the Reichskanzlei, and the Kit’s awful childish behaviour, and the way in which he tried to say everything he could to wound me.⁴ He succeeded in a way because I had been so happy and excited. However, it is all over now and I shall be frightfully busy today; and tomorrow I shall go to England.

I thought the Führer’s speech was wonderful⁵ and it was a perfect ending to the day when I blotted out of my mind the sad part.

Well darling, I can never thank you enough for all your sweetness and we will have such a lot to talk over at home. I will send the money.

All love & masses of kisses, Nardy

Darling Nard,

I did so hate having to leave you in such a hurry last night & there were such a lot of things to discuss. I do hope the Kit is less nasty by now; but all the same he didn’t succeed in spoiling the day did he, it was a lovely day wasn’t it. And wasn’t the Winterhilfswerk wonderful, I simply thought the Führer’s speech was one of the best I ever heard him make. He was sweet in the train last night & we had a lot of jokes, he went to bed about 2 but I stayed for ages talking to Gauleiter Wagner¹ whom I love like anything, and Hoffmann got terrifically drunk & started telling me how cold English women are. He said he had been ages in England & had only had one affair!

I do hope you will be coming south some time soon when I return. I may not arrive in London till Monday, as the Kreistag lasts till then & Wagner has promised me tickets for everything. I shall hear Frau Scholtz-Klink² speak, aren’t I lucky.

Well I do hope the Kit is being better now.

With best love & Heil Hitler, Bobo

Darling:

I did not mean to write but I am so bored and miserable that I feel I must. I have been here a week tomorrow and I have been alone the entire time.¹ The Führer is here but he is frightfully busy and I haven’t seen him. The only person who has been beloved is Wagner, he is so wonderfully sweet and he said he will ring us up in England just to say ‘Good night sleep well’. But he has gone, ages ago, back to Munich. The real reason why I am writing is because I am worried about Jonathan. He looked so sad when I left and it must seem very long to him. Please darling will you write to him. I can’t you see.² I have got them their Reichswehr uniforms and a few other things. It is very odd you know but in the summer I spent 10 weeks on end without seeing them, and I didn’t worry about them, but I can hardly bear it this time, I feel sure they think I have forgotten my promise to be back in a very few days.

There was snow when I arrived but now it is warm and horrid. I thought I would come back on Sunday, but now it looks more like being next Sunday.

This letter is as boring as I feel, I am afraid. When I do get back I will ring up, but I expect I shall go straight to the Unexpected.³ I have missed seeing the Kit, he will be there tonight & tomorrow during his tour. Now I shall not see him for more than a week. Altogether everything is vile.

Please wish me luck.

By the way do you remember how we thought we would hate it if the Führer called us good souls? Well Wagner said to me ‘Sie sind ja eine gute Seele’⁴ and it made my day.

Well goodbye darling, and please write to little Jonathan and say I send him love and a hug and everything; and to Desmond too, though I don’t think he misses me very much. I miss them both so terribly much.

All love darling & Heil Hitler! Nardy

Darling Boud

Peter Rodd is going off to try & find you¹ so I am writing this on the chance. I do hope he will find you. I expect you will have realized what agonizing worry the whole family has been in ever since we heard. It was really as if there had been a death in the family when I arrived – it still is, people are always coming round to condole or sending flowers, the house is a bower.

I was in Munich when I heard, oh I was sad, it seemed like my old Boud had died or something, of course I came scramming back at once, but thank goodness I saw my friend² before I left & he was a perfect angel & comforted me like anything, tho’ he was terribly sad himself about it. When I returned I couldn’t believe that my woolgathering Boud wouldn’t be on the doorstep to greet me. I miss my Boud terribly – more than I would anyone else in the family. Debo keeps saying she is ‘bidding her messengers ride forth, E. & W. & S. & N., to summon her cenoi’.³ Oh Boud do come back & see us all, even if it’s only for a bit. It would make everything so much better. You see ever since you left Muv & Farve haven’t slept, Muv cries all night & Farve has to make her tea, and they both look 10 years older, & Blor’s face has gone all grey & she divides her time between crying & saying ‘Jessica has only taken two pairs of knickers & they are both too small for her & I’m afraid they will burst’. Tom is here nearly all day & when he’s not here he’s ringing up. Poor little Debo has had a dreadful time & misses you dreadfully. DO come back Boud, no one wants to prevent you from marrying Esmond,⁴ & they are all so unhappy, so is your Boud. I’m dying to see Esmond, & hear all about him, Tina⁵ knows him so I have heard some. Tina sends her love.

With best love from your Boud

Darling Sue

I got back to find such a mass of things to do that I haven’t time for a long letter.¹

I saw the family yesterday & they are miserable. Susan it isn’t very respectable what you are doing & I see their point of view I must say.

Oh dear you were stupid on the platform, those men were quite bamboozled until you got back on the train – battering on my door & asking if you were there. Why didn’t you stop in the cabinet?²

Here is a letter from Rodd. I am inclined to agree with it – after all one has to live in this world as it is & society (I don’t mean duchesses) can make things pretty beastly to those who disobey its rules.

The Daily Express named the wrong ‘peer’s daughter’ and had to pay £1,000 to Deborah for compromising her prospects of marriage.

Susan do come back. No Susan. Well Susan if anything happens don’t forget there is a spare room here (£4.10. bed).

Love from Sue

Darling:

Thank you so much for your lovely long letter. I am so terribly sorry for Muv over everything and I do not blame her for not letting Debo come.¹ It is obviously no good to argue that no one need know she has been here. I have left it and did not answer her letter at all because I could not think what to put; but I answered her long and marvellously ausführlich [detailed] letter about her visit to Decca, without mentioning Debo’s visit.

I suppose they will let them be married and I suppose it is better so. Apparently (the Wid rang up and told me this) poor Muv is again plunged in melancholy gloom.

In the mean time the Kit and I spent the long Easter weekend here in a sort of delirium of happiness. You know how that sometimes happens quite unaccountably. We were so happy, the weather was so fine, the landscape so beautiful, the horses such fun, the flowers so pretty, our walks and rides so delightful, and the food so delicious, that really it seemed like Heaven on earth.

I was depressed last week about the Debo thing (as I expect you noticed in my letter) and so it was all the more lovely in a way. After all, my darling Kit is more to me than all the visitors who are not allowed to come here.

You will see from the enclosed Private Document that Beckett & Joyce² have been too vile for any words. All the others (102 of them) have behaved nobly and written the most wonderful loyal letters etc, but these two are really disgusting rats. I am sending it to you so that if anyone of importance asks you will know the facts. Keep it carefully or send it back.

Do write all about Frank,³ I am sure he is frightfully marling [embarrassing] but I expect he has got a personality – in fact of course he must have. Mr Holme⁴ wrote me a very terrible marling letter which I must answer.

How LOVELY the new Führer-stamps are. Oh darling I wish you were here there is so much to tell & to hear.

All love Nardy

Darling Boud

Jung va ja leddra.¹ I’m glad the stockings are useful.

Your letter is really so extraorder, on reading it over again I can hardly believe you wrote it yourself, it’s so unlike you. However I suppose my good Boud has been changed by recent events.

It’s really hard for me to describe how Aunt Iris & everyone reacted to your scramming, as you ask. You see I didn’t return until after they first heard of it, & when I saw them they were mostly only thinking of the poor Fem & Male & how miserable they were & how they could possibly comfort or help them. But the vile Aunt Weenie² was heard to remark that it would be better if you were dead! But I know she thinks that about Diana & me too, & has probably often said it.

Boud how extraorder of you to say did I know that Muv went out to see you, of course I knew, a) because otherwise how could I have sent you the stockings and b) there was a terrific family conference about it beforehand, & no-one talked of anything else, & at first the idea was that I should go too, of course I wanted to awfully to see my Boud, but then it was decided that as Esmond is by way of hating the idea of me so, it might do more harm than good. So I came here instead, in the new car Farve gave me.

I met the Führer by great good luck last Tuesday, I was driving along in my car & met him at a street corner driving in his car, he hadn’t known I was back & seemed very pleased to see me & got out into the street to speak to me & everyone rushed from all directions shouting ‘Heil!’ when they saw him. He asked me to go back to tea with him & I followed his cars to his flat & sat with him for 2½ hours alone chatting. He wanted to hear all about you & what had happened since I saw him last. He had forbidden it to appear in the German papers which was nice of him wasn’t it – at least perhaps you won’t think so as Nancy says Esmond adores publicity. However he got enough of it in other countries.

I think Rodd was boring about the whole thing, right from the beginning he wanted to arrange everything & adored it, & he was dying to be the Heroic Brother-in-law who rushed out to France (expenses paid by Farve) to bring you back. Also it was his silly & expensive idea to make you a ward in Chancery. I don’t suppose, either, that you much loved his interview to the Daily Mail – or perhaps you didn’t see it – in which he said that you only became a communist in order to ‘get even’ with me.

Well I wonder when your wedding will be, I don’t suppose I shall be invited but still.

Bedsd Lodge Vruddemb³, Je Boudle

Dear Madrigal¹

I was pleased to get my old Hen’s letter. I thought I should never hear from her again.

A good many things seem to have happened since you left, but nothing of much importance.

It’s pretty dull down here without a Hen to chat to. Muv & Farve have been so depressed since you left, it’s made them look quite ill.

The cruise would have been so good for Muv but it’s rather natural she doesn’t want to go any more.² She said all the fun would have gone without you & I think she meant it. I do hope you have enough to eat & everything. I envy you the coffee you must get there.

Do write & give an exact description of Esmond. It’s so fascinating to think of my old Hen in love that I must hear everything about him.

The hunting all the winter has been fun, & now I am training a horse.

The Grand National was marvellous, but Derek’s³ horse got knocked over by a loose horse which was disappointing. Lord Berners⁴ had a horse in for the first time in his life & the Mad Boy⁵ said to us before the race ‘If it falls at the first fence Gerald will be broken hearted’. And it did! Wasn’t it awful. But luckily he is very short-sighted & he thinks it was the second fence so all is OK.

Well dear, do write & if you want anything in the way of clothes just write to your Hen & she’ll get them for her Hen. Or anything else in fact.

Do write often to Blor. It would cheer her up. She has gone to Hastings for a week as I’m going to Castle Howard next week.

Much love from Scott Wallace

Dear Henri Heine,

Thanks for your letter, I did like getting it. I expect you are at Castle Howard now. If so will you ask George¹ what was in his Greetings ’Gram that Nancy brought out with her among my letters? I opened it & saw some message about Dolly² but I didn’t really take it in as I was so busy reading all the other letters, & now it’s lost. Anyway tell him that jokes about Dolly are rather ‘vieux jeu’ [old hat] now, & give him my love!

Well here’s a description of Esmond which you ask for. He has got blue eyes & beige hair about the colour of mine and he talks rather like Michael Farrer³ only with a slight cockney pronunciation – for instance he says riowd instead of rood for rude. Also he can do awfully good imitations of people like Winston Churchill⁴ & he talks French so well you’d take him for a Frenchman, because once a Frenchman said to him ‘vous êtes Alsacien, Monsieur?’ which proves it. (He is frightfully good at languages altogether & has already learnt enough Spanish to talk in quite easily, but your poor old Hen can hardly speak a word.) I expect you know most about his doings such as scramming from Wellington etc from seeing it in the papers so won’t bother to tell you. Didn’t you guess slightly what your old Hen was up to in London the week before I left, for instance when I hurriedly rang off when you came into the room one day & you asked me why I did & I was cross?

Now dear about my clothes; it’s very cheery & Hen-like of you to say you’ll get them for me etc in fact you are the only one to have made a nice suggestion like that. I’ll tell you what though; you know my Worth satin dress that’s been dyed purple? Well I don’t suppose I shall need a dress like that for ages by which time it’ll be out of fashion; so I wonder if you could very kindly try & sell it for me? Being Worth & just newly cleaned & dyed it might fetch quite a lot. I suggest you should take it to Fine Feathers or somewhere & try & get about three to five pounds for it. It would really be most Beery of you if you could dear & I would be grateful. I don’t actually need any of my other clothes at present but when the hot weather comes I’ll write to you for them.

I wonder if you could write me a really delicious long letter telling among other things exactly what account the Rodds gave of their visit out here. Rodd wrote me a long & incredibly boring letter with points numbered 1), 1(a), 2), etc!!! about how silly it was of me not to come home & I think they were rather cross because we were not impressed by it! I had a letter from Boud the other day in which she said ‘Nancy says Esmond adores publicity’, which seems to me to be absolutely incomprehensible considering we spent the whole time in St Jean de Luz frantically trying to escape reporters; so if everything she said has been as untrue as that I wish she’d never come out here. Not that it matters, but it seems so stupid of her. Do tell me any other bits of fascinating gossip that you have heard.

Well Dear I long to see you; we may be coming to England about the end of Sept so I’ll see you then.

Love from (Stone) Henge

P.S. Your letter was much the nicest I’ve had for ages.

Darling Nard

Fancy you being in Berlin again, I was so surprised to get your letter. I imagine the Führer is there isn’t he?

Do come here for the weekend, everyone has been asking when you are coming, it’s such ages since you were here. The Baroness¹ would be so thrilled – you know how she hates me & adores you.

I think I gave the impression that our conversation about the party was more important than it was. Only he said very emphatically, & enlarged upon it quite a lot, that he thought it might have proved a fatal mistake in England to call them fascists & Blackshirts instead of something typically English, and suggested that if he had been starting a party in England he would have gone back to Cromwell & perhaps called his SA ‘Ironsides’. I thought that rather a sweet idea don’t you.

Well let me know when & where you arrive & I will meet you in the car.

Best love from Bobo

P.S. Have you seen Frau Doktor [Magda Goebbels]? She really wrote such a sweet letter about Decca.

Darling Boud

Thanks so much for your letter, I was so pleased to get it.

About Esmond’s feeling for fascists (actually I prefer to be called a National Socialist as you know) I will explain how I feel about it, & I don’t really see why he should feel any different. I hate the communists just as much as he hated Nazis, as you know, and it naturally wouldn’t occur to me, nor would I want, to make friends with a lot of communists, if I had no reason to. But I don’t see why we shouldn’t personally be quite good friends, though politically enemies. Of course one can’t separate one’s politics & one’s private life, as you know Nazism is my life & I very much despise that democratic-liberal-conservative-English idea of walking about arm-in-arm with one’s opponent in private life and looking upon politics as a business or hobby; but I do think that family ties ought to make a difference. After all, violent differences of opinion didn’t prevent you & me from remaining good friends did they. My attitude to Esmond is as follows – and I rather expect his to me to be the same. I naturally wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him if it was necessary for my cause, and I should expect him to do the same to me. But in the meanwhile, as that isn’t necessary, I don’t see why we shouldn’t be quite good friends, do you. I wonder if he agrees.

As to me turning against my Boud as you say, how could you think I would. On the contrary I was one of the very few who always was on your side, all through. The only other ones who always stuck up for you, & who I never heard say anything against you or blame you in any way, were Diana & Tom. (And Muv of course, but that was a bit different.) I am longing to see you & tell all about the different attitudes, I expect you are longing to hear too aren’t you.

I hear from the old boy that the judge says you can marry, that is good news.

Oh dear I would love to see you & have a good chat – there are so many things one can’t really ask or discuss in a letter, if one did one would spend the whole day writing.

Mrs Ham is coming on Friday, it will be funny having her here & showing her round, somehow the idea of the Wid in Munich is so incongruous.

I wonder what you do in Bayonne all day, & what it’s like. Does Esmond speak French well.

By the way I think the only person who thoroughly enjoyed the family crisis was Mrs Ham. She used to come round to Rutland G about five times a day to see one or other of the family, she always insisted on seeing each of us alone so as to get all our individual slants on the affair. Do you remember she used to call you the ballroom communist?

Well Boud do write again at once, I long to hear from you. I plan to return to England about the 25th April & stay for the coronation.¹

Do you remember P. Nevile’s ridiculous demonstration for Edward VIII?² If I didn’t think him so odious I should really be sorry for him. He must be congratulating himself, by the way, on making quite a bit out of your affair. I should claim it if I were you.³

Well Boud do write soon.

Best love fruddem, je Boudle

Dear Hengist & Horsa,

Your old Hen is sorry she hasn’t written for such an age, she has kept meaning to & is always starting letters to her Hen & then losing them. You were kind to take all that trouble about my dresses at Fine Feathers, & I was pleased with the £2.10. I know what a bore it is seeing about that sort of thing, & thank you so much for doing it. I certainly don’t think I shall sell the Worth for so little. As for the white chiffon dress, I don’t think it’s worth anything at all as it’s so badly made; why don’t you get Blor to make you a smart evening shirt out of it to go with your navy moiré coat & anyway, I don’t want it any more.

Are you coming to your old Hen’s wedding with Muv on the way to Italy? I do hope so. At least I’m afraid it’ll be very dull for you being at the Consulate. But do come all the same. Was it fun at Cortachy? I saw in Vogue that there was a list of ‘important debutantes’ (such as Gina,¹ & Iris Mountbatten²) & a list of beauties, & Jean³ was in a horrid sort of side list which included neither!

Peter Nevile has been out here for a few days on his hol, he told all about his visit to Rutland Gate & seemed to admire you very much – we played ‘Which would you push out of bed’ with him & he kept you for nearly everyone!

Two other English people have been out here, they are absolute torture, (a married couple), the wife writes in Woman & Beauty, & kept saying how she is an attractive woman & hopes still to be so when she is 35! Somehow we couldn’t get rid of them, you know how one can’t with English acquaintances in foreign towns.

I saw a dachshund just like Jaky today, & suddenly realized I had completely forgotten his existence. Is he still alive? Der mann, der pet.

I’m sorry this letter is so short & boring, but anyway I hope to see you soon. Give my love to Muv & Boud.

Love from an old Ho Hon

P.S. Sweet Blor sent me a weddinger of £1, isn’t she an angel.

Dear Anglo Saxon

Thank you so much for your letter, I was pleased to get it.

I am having rather a fascinating time. For instance I went to London to see Jean & Gina in their dresses before they went to the court. All the Wernhers’ servants from Lubenham came up & the stud groom was rather drunk & lay full length on the sofa whistling!! It was a scream.

There is going to be a terrific party on coronation night with the Ogilvys & the Lloyd Thomas’s & Wellesleys & Astors. It will be a riot. Maggot¹ & I are going to Florence on Friday.

I do so wish I was coming to your wedding, it cuts into a Hen’s heart not to be at her Hen’s wedding.

I know I shan’t enjoy Florence because I shall be wishing I was at your wedding.

Well dear, do write often, the letters will be forwarded to wherever we are.

Love from Sack of Rome

Dear Henry Hall

Dear, you can’t imagine how terribly sad I am about not coming to your wedding. You must know that I want to come & I certainly don’t think that going to Florence with Maggot is a good enough excuse but you know how hopeless the parents are when they get something into their heads. I am writing this on mourning paper, because of not coming.

I did like ringing you up last night.

I am sitting in the Marlborough Club waiting for the coronation.¹ We got up at 5 this morning & helped Muv dress. She was so killing because she went to Phyllis Earle’s² yesterday to be made up & she slept on her makeup & I must say she looked wonderful this morning. The robes are too wonderful & she looked marvellous in her jewels.

Tud³ came to breakfast at 6 & he looked a knockout in his uniform, really wonderful. We got here by tube with the old boy. The crowds are terrific & they cheer everything that goes by, even fainting people on stretchers so I sing ‘cheer cheer what shall we cheer’.

Love from Jack Harris

Oh dear, I do wish I was coming to Bayonne. I can’t tell you how furious I am about it.

Dear, do write when we go abroad.

Darling Boud

This is to wish you happiness & a lovely wedding, I don’t suppose it will get to you in time but still. The Fem started off this morning, and she is taking with her a gram[ophone] which is a club present from Tiny [Deborah] & your Boud, I hope it plays all right, it seemed to when I bought it.

PLEASE write & tell your Boud all about your wedding, & what presents you have had & everything, I am dying to hear. The Fem told me she had bought you a wedding dress.

Oh dear it will be extraorder to think of my Boud being married, and you can’t think how much I miss her. I DO hope you will come back a bit before the autumn. I would like to motor from Munich to see you, but I suppose I should skeke [hardly] be very welcome among the comrades at Bayonne.

Well Boud I DO hope you will be very happy, and I shall think of you all day on your wedding day, & wish I was there.

I drove Blor over to Egham yesterday for her hol.

Farve sends his best love.

With very best love from your Boud

Darling Cord,

A delicious looking tin parcel arrived for me this morning with postmark Ashbourne, so it must have been your present.¹ I did long to open it but the awful thing was there was 500 francs customs to pay on it. So I asked the postman if there was any way of getting out of paying it & he said only by returning it to the sender. So I thought perhaps that would be the best, although I hated seeing it go without even opening it, but as we may be returning to England in the autumn perhaps I can have it then? Anyway thank you millions of times for sending it. I am excited to have it. The others told me it was a lovely necklace & I am so longing for it. The only other way I could have it would be if anyone going to Paris or somewhere could send it to me from there.

We are staying in Cousin Nellie’s² house, it is too lovely here & we adore it. We are going back to Bayonne (Hôtel des Basques) on Friday, as Csn Nellie & Bertram are coming here.

Well thank you again so much for the weddinger.

Love from Decca

Page from Lady Redesdale’s scrapbook with cuttings about Jessica’s wedding to Esmond Romilly.

Darling Sooze

Really Susan it was your turn to write – or not? Anyway I would have written for your wedding only the typical Fem never told me until the day before or so & I didn’t note on my mantelpiece ‘Col & Mrs Romilly request the honour (pleasure) of your company at the wedding of their son’ etc etc but perhaps it slipped down the back, all my invites do.

Life here is very hectic & I am having a good time. In August we go to Naples, why don’t you come? The German Amb. invited us to a party in German which is very rude so Rodd refused in Yiddish but I took the letter away because of my weak mind & not wanting to be tortured when the G’s have conquered us.

Love to Esmond & you, Susan

P.S. I hope you got our wedding telegram all right. The Fem didn’t seem to think so.

Dear Hen whose Hen has by now given up all hope of her Hen writing to her Hen

Well dear we are in the train doing a horrid long journey of 6 hours from Vienna to Salzburg to meet Birdie.

Yesterday we went to stay with Janos [von Almasy] & Baby¹ took us in her car. We found Mrs Janos in a great state because Janos had been taken off by the gendarmes because he was thought to be plotting for the Nazis & the soldiers had been through all his papers & writing desk & they had found the picture of Bobo & H. & were in a state about it.

Baby has got the most fascinating collection of Angela Brazil² school stories I have ever seen.

How are you getting on with your honeymoon & when are you going back to Bayonne.

I must say I have enjoyed myself in filthy abroad although I am longing to get back to the old homeland. (Angela Brazil almost.)

I am in a frenzy because I can’t find out what has won the Derby although it happened yesterday.

Bobo – the brute – has started an anti the WID league & Diana has joined. So I have started a pro one & Tom & Nancy & Muv are joining.

Will you too? If so I will send you the forms, & the conditions are (i) that you will always pay her taxis etc for her & (ii) that you will always give her any clothes that she asks for & (iii) that you help her with her packing or whatever is worrying her at the moment & (iv) that you will always buy her clothes off her at 4 times their price.

The subscription is £500 a year which will go towards her upkeep.

Love from Embittered Hen

Dear Miss Girdlestone or Geldedstone,

I got your letter¹ on arriving here last night, forwarded from Bayonne. It must have taken ages getting here, & what’s more I’m afraid you won’t get this for ages as I’ve only got your address up to the 23rd which seems to be today. Oh how cheerless. Dear I simply can’t thank you enough for the absolutely HEAVENLY gramophone, oh I do adore it you really are a cheery young tart to send me such a marvellous present. It’s easily one of the nicest we’ve had. I wrote to my Boud thanking her too. The following are what I’ve had so far: Muv, lovely brush set with JLR on the back, a ruby & diamond ring which is absolute heaven & I can’t stop looking at my hands on account of it; Tello,² killing hideous black bag with rosebuds on it (‘at least three pence, Sydney’)³ but wasn’t it sweet of her to send it; Woman, cheque; Derek, cheque; Tuddemy, cheque (goodness how nice). That isn’t all but I can’t remember all the others now. Sweet Peter Ram’s bottom wrote asking what I wanted & apologising for not sending a present out to Spain!! So I thought of suggesting records, which I’ve asked George for, too.

I expect Muv’s told you all the low down on the wedding so I won’t bother to enlarge on it. It really was great fun, & we nearly giggled from nerves during the ceremony. Afterwards we went to Paris where we jollied ourselves up in nightclubs etc for two days, it was fun but rather tiring & it’s lovely to be here for a bit. Dieppe is full of the most extraorder people, they all seem about 70 but according to Cousin Nellie never stop having affairs with each other, chiefly as far as I can make out in the darkened corners of the Bridge club.

Being a married Hen is not at all unlike being an unmarried Hen has been during the last few months, except it seems rather extraorder to have a wedding ring & a mother in law & everything. Well Henderson dear I must thank you again millions of times for the phone, it was too sweet of you to give me such a lovely expensive gift.

Best love from Decca

P.S. Maggot sent me a photo of a statue of a naked gentleman: do thank her for it if she is with you. Cousin Nellie has got The Well of Loneliness⁴ here, your poor old Hen is reading it but goodness it is boring, she can skeke [hardly] get through it.

Dear Straight Eight or Racing Eight

What a kind old Hen to write her Hen at last. I thought I’d give you some of your own bread or whatever it’s called & not write for ages but then I thought I must tell you about the fascinator I have fallen in love with.

There is a wonderful band led by the most wonderful & sweet man called Barnabas von Géczy¹ & they play at a delicious café called the Luitpold. Dear, there is a man in that band who simply makes your hair stand on end to look at him. We don’t know his name but he plays the violin the 2nd from the right so that is what we’ve called him. He is the personification of my type – awfully like Franchot Tone² & he sometimes makes the most fascinating faces like Maurice Chevalier.³ We go there every night so I can sit & stare at him & it makes Muv furious. The terrible thing is that he smiled twice at Bobo last night & not once at me but I think that was partly because I didn’t dare look at him much. Géczy himself is a perfect love & he always roars when he sees us. I bought two gramophone records of his yesterday, they are wonderful.

We have had quite a nice time here & we’ve had tea with Hitler & seen all the other sights.

We are going to try & get Géczy for my dance next March if he comes to London. But I expect he would be much too expensive & anyhow dance music isn’t his line so much as wonderful Hungarian tunes.

I have bought a delicious locked diary to note down all about the 2nd from the right in.

We are going home tomorrow. I am quite pleased although I have enjoyed myself like anything. If it hadn’t been for Géczy & the 2nd from the right I should have longed to go ages ago. I think Munich is no end nice all the same. If I had to live anywhere abroad I should certainly live here.

We have been away for a whole month, a record almost. I miss My Man & Studley⁴ so much that it is really them that I long to get home to.

I am going to Jean’s dance on the 23rd, & Elizabeth Wellesley’s⁵ & Gina’s. The King & Queen are going to be at Gina’s which will be wonderful because everyone will be dressed in their best. But I am terrified because I haven’t been asked to any dinner party & it will be terrifying just arriving at a dance like that.

Do write dear. Write to Wycombe.

Love from Poor Hen

who swarms for the 2nd from the right.

Dear Bird

My case¹ came on yesterday & there is a long account of the apology in The Times & a furious one in the Daily Express.

Muv wouldn’t allow me to go for some unknown reason, I was simply furious. It would have been so exciting, the first case I had ever been to to be my own, like one’s own wedding being the first one has ever been to. (Rather involved I’m afraid.)

Did the Führer go through Munich on his way to Berlin? If so I suppose we missed him by a day. Typical.

Muv was simply wonderful at Ascot yesterday, the things she said. Luckily I had my Femmerism note book with me so I wrote them down. The first was this: there were fifty aeroplanes going overhead practising for the display & I said ‘wouldn’t it be terrifying if they were enemy ones & we were being attacked from the air’. So the Fem said quite slowly and unconcernedly ‘Orrhhn, well I should always expect them to miss me’. But the way she said it – in her best Mae West style.

As we were getting out of the crowd she made her best remark for weeks. She said ‘I always think that if one had any sense one would always bring stilts to this kind of thing & just hop up on them.’ You must say that beats nearly everything. Of course they don’t look half as funny written down as they do when they are said. The important thing is to get just the right pause between ‘this kind of thing’ and ‘just hop up on them’.

Love from Tiny

¹

Dear Crackinjay

We arrived here yesterday for the first time & it is really very nice if very cold. The fishing is terrific, we caught five trout last night. As Muv & Farve are always going on about how they love housework I leave it all to them to serve them right. All I have done so far is to make a Mitford Mess – tomatoes & potato fried in oil – which is the only thing I can cook & is it delicious.

It is more than ever like a Russian novel here because Farve has taken terrific trouble to buy things he thinks Muv will like & she goes round putting all the things away that he has chosen. The worst of all was when she went to her bedroom for the first time & saw two wonderfully hideous lampshades with stars on them & she said ‘I certainly never bought these horrors’ & Farve’s face fell several miles. It is simply pathetic.

Last night a child was murdered at Capps Lodge & they haven’t arrested the man yet so I am terrified that he will be after us & I keep thinking I see his face at the window. He was the chef from the Lamb Inn at Burford.

Pam came to lunch the other day & they talked for 2½ hours about servants. Pam has had her hair dyed orange & it makes her look like a tart.

Bobo & Terence O’Connor² are having a terrific get off, but I am going to steal a march on her at his cktl pty on Wednesday as Birdie is in Germany.

The Hitler tea party was fascinating. Bobo was like someone transformed when she was with him & going upstairs she was shaking so much she could hardly walk. I think Hitler must be very fond of her, he never took his eyes off her. Muv asked whether there were any laws about having good flour for bread, wasn’t it killing.

Well dear do write often, there is nothing yr Hen likes better than a letter from hr Hen.

Love from André Gide

Darling Nancy

I only got your letter this morning because it was sent to me in a packet and then followed me back here. It was so sweet of you to write darling, and wish me happiness. Driberg’s story was all wrong and from the date on your letter I was here and not in Berlin when he offered you a free call!¹ There was no such romantic reason for my going as he told you. When you get back I will tell you the story or Muv & Farve can. Farve says the press telephone him constantly and ask him for TPOL’s² address, and he says ‘But I don’t know it, I’ve never met him’ isn’t it wonderful. I expect he adds: ‘the damned sewer’.³

So for the present I am Mrs G and intend to remain so for some time.

Best love from Bodley

Darling Boud

We sit all day playing a sad tune called ‘Somebody stole my Boud’ (alternatively ‘Somebody stole my Hen’).¹

Love, Your Boud

Dear Hen’s Egg

Well dear, the dances have begun in earnest. I must say they are exactly like what you said always – perfectly killing. I have never seen anything like the collection of young men – all completely chinless & all looking exactly alike. Last night was the Wellesleys.

According to everyone it was a really typical deb dance. Rather a small square room to dance in & many too many people in the doorway & on the stairs. I thought I should be alright & then they started to cut my dances till, in the end, in desperation I had to go home. Tuddemy has been to all the ones I have, luckily for me. He is simply wonderful & literally waits around till I haven’t got anyone to dance with & then comes & sits on a sofa or dances with me. I must say it is terribly nice of him. My conversation to the debs’ young men goes like this:

The chinless horror ‘I think this is our dance.’

Me (knowing all the time that it is & only too thankful to see him, thinking I’d been cut again) ‘Oh yes, I think it is.’

The C.H. ‘What a crowd in the doorway.’

Me ‘Yes isn’t it awful.’

The C.H. then clutches me round the waist & I almost fall over as I try & put my feet where his aren’t.

Me ‘Sorry.’

The C.H. ‘No, my fault.’

Me ‘Oh I think it must have been me.’

The C.H. ‘Oh no, that wouldn’t be possible.’ (Supposed to be a compliment.)

Then follows a long & dreary silence sometimes one of us saying ‘sorry’ & the other ‘my fault’. After a bit we both feel we can’t bear it any longer so we decide to go & sit down.

The C.H. ‘Got off camp this time, told them it was a sprained ankle, look at the bandages, ha ha’. (I look & see no bandages so suppose it must be a joke & say ‘ha ha’ too.)

Then one hears the drums rumbling & one knows that is the end of the dance & goes hopelessly back to the doorway hoping for the other chinless horror to turn up & of course he doesn’t so one scrams thankfully off to bed.

Yesterday one young man told me the same funny (?) story three times. At least I think it was the same young man but one can’t possibly tell.

Well dear, Family Life seems to go on in the same old way & I never see any of the sisters except sometimes Bobo, & the boredom of Wycombe is absolutely unbelievable. One never dares ask any of one’s friends for fear of the family taking against them & being fearfully rude ‘like only Mitfords can’. Bobo has just come back from Germany. She is going back again soon. I wish I was going with her. I should at least be able to go every night to listen to the band with the man I love in it. When she goes I shall be absolutely alone again which I hate so. There isn’t anyone to talk to because you know how the parents simply don’t listen.

Pam comes over sometimes which is awful. When Derek comes too it is worse. I never see Diana & very seldom see Nancy or Tom. So altogether it isn’t much fun. We have got to be at Wycombe for three months now. Lord only knows what I shall find to do all that time.

Everyone does the same old things here. Farve goes off to The Lady & the House of Lords & Muv paints chairs & reads books called things like ‘Stalin: My Father’ or ‘Mussolini: The Man’ or ‘Hitler: My Brother’s Uncle’ or ‘I Was In Spain’ or ‘The Jews – By One Who Knows Them’ etc etc etc. I haven’t read a book for eight months now.

I never can remember what jokes you’ve heard & what you’ve missed, but I know you can’t have heard this one. It’s a summing up of the Fem’s character by Bobo & me. It goes like this ‘Nelson, bread of my life, meet me tonight without any doctors or any medicine under the kitchen table’.¹ You must say it’s a wonderful summing up. Well dear, hotcha.

Love from Yr Hen

Dear Henderson,

Thanks v. much for amusing letters

Have you been to any more dances? I gather from your letters that you more or less loathe most of them, I must say deb dances aren’t the cheeriest form of entertainment. But it seems all the more marvellous when one doesn’t have to go any more; Esmond says that’s the same as being at a public school or remand home, that always afterwards you think how lucky you are not to be there still. Anyway I expect next year it really will be more fun; I call the middle of July an extraorder time to come out, you might have liked it more if you had come out at the beginning of the summer.

Couldn’t you cheer off abroad somewhere, e.g. to Italy with the Rodds, or Germany with the Boud? Or even France with your Hen. Where are you all going to be in the winter – R Gate or the cottage? Your Hen will be in London then, we are coming back after our Tour to live there for a few months while your Hen has her baby etc. Shall I call it Henderson, or even Hon Henderson & everyone’ll think it’s the Hon(ble) Henderson. Did you know your old Hen was in pig.¹ Yes dear, you had better be training as a young midwife, as soon as possible. I hope you will be its Henmother (Honnish for Godmother) anyway. Do write to your Hen & say if you are interested about it. Your poor Hen never stopped sicking up all her food for about three months on account of it, which was so cheerless.

Peter R[amsbotham] & George Howard have sent us an absolute mass of phone records which is such bliss of them. Do impress how grateful I am if you see them, there’s such a terrific lot.

Love from Henry

Darling Susan,

Thanks for yr. letter. All is oke now really, but Susan I must just remind you of a few things you seem to have forgotten! Susan how can you say you & Rodd were pro Esmond & me living together when you wrote saying how unrespectable it was & how Society would shun me, & Rodd wrote saying how French workmen would shun me. In fact what you actually wanted us to do was to come home to England, in which case I should have been caught by the P’s¹ & narst old Judge & altogether teased in every way. So what you were really against was both us getting married and us living together not married. Do you admit, Susan. Do you also admit it was a bit disloyal just as I was thinking you were the one I could count on to be on my side through thick and. Anyway it’s all such ages ago now I expect you’ve forgotten a bit what you did do, &, as you say, now we are married there’s no point in [illegible].

I am going to have a baby in January (1st to be exact, oh Susan do you remember poor Lottie’s² agonies, & I expect it’s much worse for humans), yes Susan some of us do our duty to the community unlike others I could name. Shall I call it Nancy? I think skeke [hardly] as I have a feeling it’s going to be a boy, & being called Nancy might prove a handicap to it throughout life. I do hope it will be sweet & pretty & everything. Goodness I have been sick but I’m not any more now.

The bathing here is absolute heaven, we go to Biarritz nearly every day. Well Soose. End of paper.

Love from Susan

Darling Sooze

Oh thank goodness what a weight off my mind. Well Susan now I know that all is OKE I am sending you a) a narst little diamond ring as I know it is nice to have things of popping value even if only for a few pounds & b) which you will like much more Busman’s Honeymoon¹ which must be the funniest book ere written. And I daresay some cash will be forthcoming in Jan. when needed. Susan fancy you with a scrapage. I don’t think you are fit to bring one up after your terribly awful behaviour but what luck that you will always have dear old aunt Nancy at hand to advise & help.

Love from Sooze

Dearest Henderson,

It WAS lovely seeing you & Blor, you can’t think how terribly pleased I was you could come. I only wish you were still here, it seemed such an awfully short time.

I do hope you weren’t bored & I didn’t talk about Esmond all the time like Woman does about Derek, but you know it seems such an AGE since he went, however he’s coming back today for certain.

I think I only really realized, from seeing you, what things had been like at home; it is so extraorder how people can make themselves so miserable when there’s nothing to be miserable about, & of course I’m dreadfully sorry they were so unhappy. It seems such a tease that one can’t be what one likes without causing all that misery. The more I think of it the less I can understand it.

Best love from Squalor

It’s early Spring in January, because I’m in pig.

Darling:

I would have written ages ago, but we are having a heat wave of terrific proportions and it is really boiling and I spend the days in a pair of bathing pants and a shirt. I am reading Mein Kampf.¹ Everything looks unbelievably beautiful.

4th August. I have got a lot to erzähl [tell] about the Oxford Group. Annemarie² said could she come here, so I said yes (I was alone) and she came needless to say with Mr [Reginald] Holme & Miles Phillimore.³ They arrived for lunch and made an onslaught which lasted till 10.45, trying to persuade me to go back to Oxford with them for the weekend. It was a very special weekend with very important people, and Frank [Buchman] had said would I come etc. I did not want to go in the least but as I was alone here I had no reason. When they saw I was set against it they tried a sort of mixture of flattery (‘you could change the world’) and blackmail and threats (‘you are afraid of being converted. You are not a revolutionary if you don’t give us a fair trial’). ‘Why not?’ is the answer I think!!

Anyway it ended with a Quiet Time. I did not write anything on the bit of paper they gave me although I thought of lots of jokes. They all read out their guidance and it consisted mostly of God saying he wanted me to go to Oxford. In the end they went off in despair. I suppose Frank had told them to bring me back. But during the day I got a terrific nausea for the whole silly affair, and when they said Frank had changed the world and prevented industrial disputes etc I asked how long he had been at it; they replied since 1921, so I said that was as long as the Führer, leaving them to make the comparison. I said in order to change anything properly in the modern world you had to have a political organization and several thousand people willing to give their lives and some machine guns. I said why the hell didn’t Frank stick to America and try and change that, because the industrial disputes there were the horror of the whole world.

They were very hurt and made all kinds of lame answers. 6 August. So then I said you will never get me for your sort of ‘revolution’ because I am a realist and we must have a framework first in England. Miles Phillimore, ‘We are realists too, and after all when I had been in New Zealand a year, the Prime Minister said “the Oxford group is the only policy for the world”.’ And what difference has it made him saying that?

But the thing that makes me angriest is when they harp on the fact that Frank said publicly ‘thank God for Adolf Hitler’. They tell one that as if it were gleichzeitig [at the same time] very brave and a terrific compliment for the Führer.

I am sorry for all this boring outburst but I longed for you to be there at the time. Although I am really fond of Annemarie I shall not lift a finger for her to see the Führer while she is with that ghastly Frank.

It is so lovely and calm here with Kit. We don’t even ride, but just lie in the sun and listen to the wireless, and fish, and row in a tiny little boat he has brought. I am so happy. At the end of next week Vivien⁴ & Nicky⁵ come, and then it will be less peaceful. The boys are coming too and I am perfectly dying for them.

This letter has gone on so long it must be a birthday letter now darling, so many happy returns, and I enclose the usual dull-but-useful.

I wish you were here. Kit wants you to come & bring the Princesses Wrede⁶ with you!!

All love, Nardy

P.S. Miles & co kept being guided to use my telephone for trunk calls! They all ring up nearly every day but I say I am away. They are nothing daunted by my firmness. Of course they are mad to get to see the Führer. But then who isn’t?

Darling Nard

Thank you so much for your letter. It arrived just after I had posted my letter to you, with the photo

I quite forgot to thank you for the lovely photos of the boys, I was so pleased with them & I shall stick them in my family book when I go to England.

Erna is most terribly aufgeregt [excited] about ‘Entartete Kunst’,¹ she says that the artists in it are the only good ones in Germany today and the whole world envies Germany for them. She has stopped working in her shop because her brother is afraid the SS will come & smash the windows if she is caught selling reproductions of modern pictures (that sounds unlikely doesn’t it) and she sits at home in Solln all by herself getting aufgeregter & aufgeregter. I spent a whole afternoon & evening with her & she didn’t speak of anything else at all, just a torrent of Aufregung [excitement]. She goes to the exhibition every day, & she says that all the really artistic people in Munich are freu-ing [enjoying] themselves like anything because they say, never before have we had a chance of seeing all these wonderful pictures collected together in one Ausstellung [exhibition], & they go every day, & noch dazu [what’s more] the entrance is free. She says all the Americans come to her & say ‘If only we could have this wonderful collection in America, wouldn’t they let us take it over?’ I asked Erna to let me go to it with her but she refused but at last I persuaded her & we went, I feel I learnt quite a lot by it. She has small pictures by two of the artists, which they gave her themselves, hanging in her house, in fact she has three pictures by Nolde. [incomplete]

Darling Boud

I have been wanting to write to you for ages but I didn’t know your address, now Muv has sent me the Dieppe one & says it will find you. I hope it will. Do write to your Boud soon.

I did envy Blor & Tiny going to see my Boud, I do hope I will soon. I hear you had a tooth out without anaesthetic, poor Boud how awful. How is the baby, I hear you can feel it kicking already. It is so exciting, I do envy you. I think I really must have a darling little Bastard, it would be so sweet & I should love it. Do you hope for a boy or a girl? What will you call it?

Clementine [Mitford] & I went with the Führer to Bayreuth for the festival, we were there ten days, it was lovely. Kukuli von Arent¹ was in Bayreuth, & she hadn’t heard about you, she was perfectly amazed when I told her & kept on saying ‘Aber die Decca war doch so nett! Sie war doch so lustig und reizend!² Do you remember when the two SS men here called you ‘die lustige Kommunistin’? Clementine went to England from Bayreuth, & I returned here. I have seen the Führer a lot lately which has been heaven, only now he has gone back to his mountain for a bit.

I do hope you are having lovely weather for your motor tour. We have been having a heat wave here for a week, but today alas it’s raining. The other day when it was boiling hot I found a secluded spot in the Englischer Garten³ where I took off all my clothes & sunbathed, luckily no-one came along. While I was lying in the sun I suddenly wondered whether Muv knew I was sun-bathing naked, like when she knew that you were bathing naked, & I laughed till I ached, if anyone had come along they would have thought me mad as well as indecent.

Well Boud pray write to your Boud as soon as you get this, she does so long to hear from her Boud.

Best love from Yr Boud

Darling:

I have got a lot to erzähl [tell] about a wonderfully typical day I spent at Schwanenwerder yesterday. After discovering that the people I have come to see are all away, I rang up Magda on the chance and she asked me to come at once. Kukuli was there, radiant after spending a week with her loved one, her idyll was spoilt later in the day by Benno von Arent who bullied her to go back to her Kinder [children]. The Doktor was there and the food, conversation and whole set-up was so exactly like last year that I kept thinking it was last year. Magda wanted to play Animal Vegetable or Mineral, and when we chose something for her to guess she always complained either that it was, ‘Wirklich zu dumm, viel zu leicht’¹ etc. Or if she couldn’t guess it, it was ‘a frightfully unfair one’. When it was one of our turns she kept saying, ‘Aber Sie müssen nur logisch denken, ich hätte das in zwei minuten gefunden’.²

It was pure heaven. Then we played Analogies which I taught them. Magda got the hang of it in a moment, and we had a heavenly time doing Helldorf, Frau Funk, Frau Hoffmann and so on. Then the Doktor joined us and we, or rather he, did the Führer for Kukuli. Here is what he said (we all helped and this was the result)

Animal: | Pure-bred Arab stallion
Colour: | Feuerrot³
Drink: | Ein schwerer Wein⁴
Flower: | Madonna lily*
Style: | Michaelangelo – Renaissance*
Landschaft:⁵ | Top of the Alps
Weather: | A hot storm*
Frau: | Eine grosse schöne blonde Frau⁶

Needless to say although Harald⁷ who came halfway through kept saying, ‘Aber Kinder, ganz klar, es gibt nur einer’,⁸ Kukuli failed to guess, and when she was told said, ‘Ich habe die ganze Zeit an den Führer gedacht, aber er trinkt doch nur Wasser!’⁹ Whereupon both Goebbels rounded on her so cruelly that she nearly cried. I must say it was rather dotty because we had told 23 times it had nothing to do with what the person liked, or wore etc. Well I was pleased when the Doktor said, ‘Eine grosse schöne blonde Frau’.

The lovely part of the day was a wonderful film called Entscheidende Tage [Decisive Days] and it is only real-life films, of the war, the Versailles Treaty, the revolution here, the coming of the Führer, 1923 Parteitag, meetings, Schlageter¹⁰ being shot, Jews, Nazis, the 1929 Parteitag, Machtübernahme [taking power], Aufbau [rebuilding], 1936 Parteitag. It was pure heaven, except that the Doktor schimpfed [railed] all the way through at the man who had spent eight months making it. I must say he was perfectly right because it was an awful muddle and terribly hard to know what was going on. The Doktor said he himself didn’t know half the time although he lived it all. So it has to be entirely altered, but darling the material is simply thrilling.

There was a lovely moment when the Doktor said, ‘Ich stelle mich meine Mutter vor; sie hätte fast nichts davon verstanden; es muss absolut klar sein für die einfachsten und dummsten Leute.’¹¹

There is the most heavenly picture of the Führer at the 1929 Parteitag, laughing and throwing flowers at the SA as they march vorbei [past]. Oh how I wished we had been there, it makes me cry with rage to think we were alive and yet missing everything.

Do you really think the Führer might come here? I thirst for only a glimpse of him. I know he’s at Nürnberg today because the Doktor is meeting him there. If you see Wiedemann¹² give him my fondest love and tell him I am here, could you darling.

MASSES of love, do write again, Nardy

Darling Nard,

I had lunch with the Führer in the Ost the day before the Duce¹ came, & said goodbye to him as I shan’t see him again. The little Doktor was there. We had rather a stormy scene as all of them, except the Führer, set on me because I said I didn’t like Musso, & bullied me till I was almost in tears, it was dreadful. I thought I wouldn’t be able to prevent myself crying. However the Führer took my part (without of course saying anything against Musso) & he was perfectly sweet. Of course the one that led the attack was Dr Brandt.²

Two days before Musso’s visit Wardie³ & Randolph [Churchill] arrived here. I met them at the plane & spent the whole three days with them, it was great fun. Randolph never stopped complaining because I didn’t get him an interview with the Führer & grumbling about the lack of ‘facilities’ whatever that may be, but he was very nice. Altogether, the three days were great fun & I adored it in spite of the misery of Musso coming.

May I come to Wootton for a few days when I get to England?

Best love, & to the boys, Heil Hitler, Bobo

P.S. Have you read Gone with the Wind?⁴ It is the most fascinating book ever written. I read it in under a week although it’s got 1036 pages & you know what a slow reader I am, so that just shows. One can’t put it down.

Unity on the cover of a news magazine, November 1937. Hardly a week went by during the 1930s without one of the sisters making headlines.

Darling Cord

Thank you so much for the delicious cheque for £5, I was pleased to get it, & it arrived on my birthday, too.

We went to Biddesden the other day for the wknd, it was a scream, Bryan made everyone slave away from morning till on the farm, & he kept saying to his wife ‘would you like to come for a bicycle ride?’ although it was only a week before the baby was born!¹ We have got a house looking over the river, which is heaven, I think I shall be staying here for the baby.

Thank you again for the lovely birthday gift.

Love from Decca

Dearest Crackinjay

Oh goodness the Bridgetness¹ of it! She is being so awful that I would really like to be very rude to her if it wasn’t for Maggot. This afternoon she said ‘Of course I think it is so awful for gals not to play games like tennis & golf because not only are they left out of everything but they are a fearful bore to have in the house & it is very selfish of them because they ruin everybody else’s good time’. Don’t you think it is the damn rudest thing you have ever heard when I was sitting there & she knows I can’t (& won’t) do anything like that. I was simply furious.

She says that ‘gals’ never get asked anywhere unless they are good at games. I hate the idea of being asked somewhere to ‘make up a four at tennis’. I’d much rather not go away to stay anywhere if I thought I was being asked to make even numbers for tennis of all blasted games. Why they can’t sit & talk like normal humans I can’t imagine. They are always driving you to ‘do something’. Goodness it does make me angry. I hate Bridget more than I ever have before. She is perfectly bloody.

Tom is back from Germany & has been down to Wycombe.

Well dear, do write.

The Forfar ball is on Friday. I hope it will be nice.

Much love from Henderson

Darling Honks

Thank you so much for the really wonderful gift, they are things I have always longed for but I have never afforded them as Blor always makes me buy woollen combies. They are such heaven, thank you a million times.

I had measles all through merry Xmas. It was so awful I nearly died of the horror of it.

This letter has been disinfected by Blor putting it in the oven, at least it will have been by the time you get it. The one I wrote to Bridget I specially didn’t have done.

You are kind to have sent the gorgeous gift, goodness you are.

Tuddemy says they are pretties, like the adverts.

Much love from Debo

I am still in bed for seven days as the doctor says I shall get bronchitis if I get up which makes Muv furious. I have also had some glorious medicine.

Dear Miss Measles

Oh those little armless hands* I simply adore them. Rodd thinks they are awfully sinister & they terrify him but I wear them the whole time.¹ It was kind of you.

Poor Miss how awful about yr blindness, of course one can’t help wondering what sort it is when remembering yr awful reputation.²

Yes it is very nice here – Rodd spends his time making hats for Helen,³ & SHE WEARS them. So we are happy.

Love from Get on & get out of here.⁴

* The little armless hand

It lies upon the land

It cannot hold

It cannot mould

Nor rub an aching gland

It lies alone & makes no moan⁵

Dearest young Hen,

How I do love your delicious gift of face cream, it really is just what I wanted dear thank you so much.

I was amazed at your letter in the Fem’s writing, it seemed so extraorder to see Honnish terms in a non-Hon’s handwriting.

How simply wretched for you having measles, poor old Hohon.

The baby¹ is terribly strong already & you could have seen it and me any time if you hadn’t been a young germ carrier.

We had the most heavenly Xmas you can image. Yr Hen had in her stocking: E. Arden bath salts & hand lotion, L. Philippe lipstick, Atkinson scent, Turkish delight, two boxes of chocolates, a book and 1s worth of cream which she drank down at one gulp. The poor Babe hung its sock but didn’t get a damn thing! Luckily it didn’t seem to notice.

Dear you can’t imagine how sweet it is, I long for you to come & see it. She hasn’t got any of the disadvantages of so many babes such as excessive redness & baldness & smelling of sick.

Yr Hen is loving her delicious time in bed, tho of course it isn’t nearly such heaven now as over the Xmas hol when Esmond was here all the time;² but Id is coming today & I hope lots of people will be scramming down here.

Well dear

Not much news

So cheer ha.

Love from Beery

Darling Nard

I had great fun my last week in Vienna, Heine Bleckmann took me out a lot, & I also met some other friends who I went out with; so I saw quite a lot of the life in Vienna.

Of course hopes are high here about the Reichstagsrede;¹ and the evening on which it came out that Schuschnigg² was with the Führer, Vienna was in an uproar. No-one could think of anything else, & the first thing everyone – taxi-men, shop assistants or friends – said to one was ‘Haben Sie gehört? Der Schuschnigg ist beim Führer!’³ I do hope the result won’t be a disappointment. Poor Austria is such a tragic country, & the people here really such heroes, I had never realized how really heroic the Kampf [struggle] here is until my time in Vienna. I have never met such fanatics in Germany as I have here. Several times young men have come up to me & said, ‘May I kiss the hand the Führer has touched?’ – not at all in a gallant or complimentary way, but merely because they do really so worship him, rather like a Christian might kiss a bit of wood which Christ had touched. And they all talk of ‘draussen im Reich’⁴ with bated breath, as if they were talking of Heaven.

Do write – to [Pension] Doering.

Best love from Bobo

Dearest Hen,

Thank you so much for writing.¹

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? They would have to keep Rose on at £1.1.3 a week (the 1/3d is insurance).

Love from Henderson

Darling Debo

Last night the Führer was talking about which of us was going to the Parteitag, and he says he specially wants you to go. Isn’t it wonderful. I told what a marvellous rider you are and he thinks you are so beautiful and wants you to see the Parteitag while you are young. So of course I said you would be thrilled and he arranged it all, on the spot. Isn’t he kind and sweet. He talked a lot about Farve and his speech¹ and said he should thank him very specially when he sees him at Nürnberg.

I must rush off now, but I know you will be excited when you get this.

Lots of love from Honks

Darling Boud

You can’t think how thrilled your Boud was – in fact we all were – to read your letter to the Fem, the Fem was out when it arrived & your Boud died to open it but she managed not to. I am so glad you are in Corsica because ever since we went there I have thought it the most heavenly place in the world – do you remember the attractive French officer Yobboud fell in love with in that fortress in Ajaccio, and is he still there?¹

Boud ee ub je eedjend vegudden je Boudle² because she thinks the whole time about you. I was so terribly sad to be coming back knowing my Boud wouldn’t be there, and altogether your Boud has been so much in despair about it all & so miserable that she couldn’t write until now.

I feel sure you are having the most wonderful time & I envy you all the sun & bathing like anything.

Baby [Erdödy] is here, she came back to England with me in my car & we both return to the Continent next week. She sends you lots of love. I think she is quite enjoying it here. Yesterday Aunt Puss³ took us both to a play & was killing as usual. The Widow adores Baby & wants her to go to Totland Bay. The other day there was a huge headline in the E. Standard – ‘BLACK WIDOWS DOOMED IN CASE OF WAR’. Naturally we all supposed it included the Widow but it turned out that it means the Black Widow spiders at the Zoo, because their bites are fatal & they intend killing them at once in case a bomb or something might break their cage & let them loose. Isn’t it killing. The Widow stayed here for two nights she was a scream, she wore a shiny green satin blouse which Farve insisted on calling her ‘imperméable’, he also kept saying she had à ‘coiffure à la jolie femme’.⁴ We all shrieked.

Well Boud I have enjoyed writing to you because I almost feel as if we had had a chat.

Very best love from Yobboud

Darling Nard

It is a shame you can’t come to Bayreuth, & also to the Berg¹ tomorrow, I am really awfully excited for that because it’s the only side of his life which I don’t know at all. Magda will be sorry you’re not in Bayreuth, won’t she.

What I couldn’t tell you on the telephone was this. You remember my little friend from Vienna who you said was like an Indian, & his pretty blonde fiancée who asked the Führer for an autograph in the Osteria. Well yesterday she telephoned & said could she come & see me for five minutes, but her fiancé mustn’t know anything about it. So this morning she came, & she was here when you telephoned. You know Heinz, her fiancé, was a member of the SS in Vienna – I believe since 1932. He was a tremendously enthusiastic Nazi & really risked everything for the cause during the Schuschnigg Regime. Well it seems that just after the Machtübernahme² his father, also a member of the Partei, who had brought him up to be very ‘national-denkend’ [nationalistically minded], told him that both his (Heinz’s) mother’s parents were Jewish. Of course poor Heinz was completely erledigt [shattered] when he heard it, & wanted to shoot himself at once, which it seems to me would have been the best way out. Though, officially, he doesn’t count as a Jew as both the grandparents were baptized. But for Heinz, being a real Nazi ‘aus Überzeugung’ [by conviction], that naturally made no difference. His father made him promise not to do anything until they had had a reply to their Ersuch [request] to the Führer, but so far there has been no reply, & in the meanwhile of course he is having what is practically a nervous breakdown. Well it seems that there are several half-Jews who have, at one time or another, been allowed to remain in the Party on account of special Verdienste [services]. So they hope that he also will, though of course this will anyhow, from his own point of view, have ruined his life. So she came to ask me if I would help her, & I told her that if she would write a personal letter to the Führer I would give it to him personally. Isn’t it awful for them, poor things. I must say it gave me an awful shock when she told me.

At lunch, a man who was there, said the Osteria was just like an Italian Osteria, ‘nur viel sauberer’.³ At that the Führer looked at me out of the corner of his eye & then started to blither [giggle] quite uncontrollably, & when he had sufficiently regained his composure he said ‘Das hört sie gern’.⁴ I think the man was amazed. When he left he said, ‘come to the Berg any day you like between now & the 20th’. Later I rang up & said might I come today, but he sent a message to say that today he has Besprechungen [meetings] but would I come tomorrow. It is a shame you’re not here.

Well now I will run out & post your dress. I will finish this letter after my Obersalzberg visit, so I can tell you about it. Later. I have just returned from posting your dress, and just as a matter of interest I must tell you what it was like, & I think you might speak to your Minister O.⁵ about it. Well I had to fill in six long & quite unintelligible forms, and then take one of them to the Reichsbank in the Briennerstrasse. Of course, all this didn’t matter at all to me as I have all the time in the world & a motor; but imagine some wretched person who had to work hard & had no motor! I think it really might be changed, do speak to the Minister about it. 20th July. Well I arrived back late last night from the Berg, & will tell you about it. It was really simply heavenly. Well the drive up takes about 20 minutes, & when I arrived at the house, there were the Führer & Wagner waiting for me on the balcony or terrass. I was taken to them through the house, & they both said, ‘Wo ist die Schwester?’⁶ so I explained. Well I must say I never in my life saw such a view as one sees from that house, the whole chain of mountains lying at one’s feet so to speak. Well the Führer & Wagner & Schaubchen⁷ & I went & had tea in the big room or hall. It is simply huge & hung with wonderful pictures & tapestry, & at one end it has a raised platform with a big round tea table & a huge Kamin [chimney], & at the other end the whole wall is one huge window. The effect is simply extraordinary. The window – the largest piece of glass ever made – can be wound down like a motor window, as it was yesterday, leaving it quite open. Through it one just sees this huge chain of mountains, and it looks more like an enormous cinema screen than like reality. Needless to say the génial [brilliant] idea was the Führer’s own, & he said Frau Troost⁸ wanted to insist on having three windows. Well after tea he showed me the whole house, even the kitchen & the maids’ bedrooms & bathrooms, and I must say it is perfectly lovely, I know you will think so. After seeing the house, which took quite a time, we went & sat in the terrace & chatted to Werlin & Dietrich & his little daughter Gisela, then the Führer said would I like to go for a walk so I said yes. Just as we were starting off, the Führer’s new huge car arrived from the Mercedes works, so of course we examined it all over. When told it went easily 150 km.p.h., he said something so typical: ‘Das ist natürlich für mich ein Nachteil, denn wenn ich so schnell fahre, bin ich 20 Minuten früher da, und muss 20 Minuten länger im Hotel oder in meiner Wohnung sitzen.’⁹ Well we started on our walk, which turned out to be a pretty long one: he & I in front, & the others following us a good way behind. We walked down the mountains, quite slowly, & the view is too lovely for words. The ‘Ziel’ [aim] of our walk was a little teahouse he has built on a projecting piece of hill, it is too pretty for words inside, round, with a big round table & very comfy armchairs all round, & flat marble pillars round the walls, & a pretty fireplace with a lovely 18th-century clock on it. We sat & had tea & he talked about politics for about an hour, in his best style, & then we walked down to where the cars were standing below the teahouse, & he put me in my car & then got into his & we drove through the new Bauernhof that is being built & then he drove back up the mountain, & I down to Berchtesgaden at about 9.

Well now I must scram out, I will write to you from Bayreuth.

My best love to the boys.

Best love from Bobo

Darling Nard

I have been meaning to write to you for several days but there hasn’t seemed to be much to tell. I am living, as you see, in the same house as always. It’s terribly hot & one can hardly sleep, & the heat is awful in the opera.

On Sunday – the morning after I arrived – I drove over to Eger to an SdP¹ demonstration at which Konrad Henlein spoke. When I arrived I was met by Wollner,² who said he could only stay five minutes ‘denn ich muss den Führer ausholen’.³ I was amazed. I was taken to the Rathaus [town hall] where there was to be a Begrüssung [reception] & there we waited & at last everyone said, ‘Der Führer kommt! Der Führer kommt!’⁴ & in came Konrad Henlein, followed by Wollner & others. Well the mayor began his Begrüssungsrede, ‘Mein Führer! Es ist für mich eine Freude und Ehre, Sie, mein Führer, begrüssen zu dürfen’⁵ etc etc. I was amazed. Afterwards I was presented to Konrad Henlein, but there was no time to chat because we had to go out to the demonstration, & I had to leave early to be in time for Tristan.

At dinner, the Führer & the Doktor & Kannenberg⁶ were all in their best form, so you can imagine we had a riotous evening. But I think the Führer teased Kannenberg dreadfully by saying that the food in the Quirinal & also in Florence was much better than his (K’s) food, and that he would never be able to achieve such perfection.

The next evening, the Führer got into quite a rage twice; the first time with Kannenberg, for whom I felt heartily sorry! The second rage, however, was over Reichsminister Gürtner⁷ & the new laws he is making. He got angrier & angrier, & at last thundered – you know how he can – like a machine-gun – ‘Das nächste Mai, dass die Richter so einen Mann freilassen, so lasse ich ihn von meiner Leibstandarte verhaften und ins Konzentrationslager schicken; und dann werden wir sehen, welches am stärksten ist, the letter of Herr Gürtner’s law oder MEINE MASCHINEN GEWEHRE!’⁸ It was wonderful. Everyone was silent for quite a time after that.

I have been having rather a terrible time on account of a young man I met in Munich just after you left – Wolfgang Hoesch by name, no relation to the Ambassador⁹ – has been pestering me with marriage proposals, & to my horror followed me here! I do have an awful time with ‘Wolfgangs’ don’t I. I have a terrible time getting rid of him here, in fact I have to get up early & drive off somewhere for the day. However thank god he has to go tomorrow anyway.

Well I will now close because I feel I must go for a walk. My love to the boys – did they get my P.C.s?

Best love & Heil Hitler! Bobo

Darling Nard

Thank you for your letter forwarded from Munich. I didn’t mean for you to feel guilty about the dress, I only told you as a matter of interest & I didn’t mind at all a bit. But of course as a matter of fact you always feel guilty, don’t you.

Well I had meant to write before but the fact is, I have had flu since Friday. I felt queer Friday night on coming home very late from the Führer’s, after Walküre. The Führer, however, had said he would take me with him to Breslau, & of course I would rather have died than miss that. So on Saturday I stayed in bed till 5, & then got up & packed, & the Sonderzug¹ left at 7. By the time it started I felt like death, & dreaded being called to dinner. You know how one sometimes can’t even raise one’s hand to comb one’s hair. However when I was with the Führer I felt sort of stimulated like one does, & he was in a sweet mood. We sat at a table with the Reichsärzteführer Wagner.² Of course eating was agony & yet I had to because I couldn’t say I was ill. Luckily the Führer had to have a Besprechung [meeting] with an officer after dinner, so I got to bed early, feeling frightfully sick. We arrived at Breslau at the unearthly hour of 7.30 A.M. We drove in Kolonne [procession] to a hotel which had been abgesperrt [closed]. One of the Führer’s secretaries had come too so that I shouldn’t be the only female on the train, & she was my sort of Begleitung [chaperone]. The hotel was full of Greatnesses of course, & Seyss Inquart³ was there. Tschammer-Osten⁴ gave us Ehrenkarten [free tickets] & a man to go with us, and we walked to the square where the march-past was to be, which was next-door to the hotel. Already the sun was almost unbearably hot – before 8 A.M. – so you can imagine what the next 4 hours were like, & I had a high temperature. We sat on the front row of the Tribüne, just behind the Führer’s little jutting-out box. Behind us were Wollner & the other Sudeten-deutsch leaders. I think Wollner was terrifically impressed that I had come with the Führer, though I think he only believed it sometimes. Well then the Führer arrived & the march-past began – 150,000 people (i.e. half as much again as the SA & SS Vorbeimarsch in Nürnberg) but they marched in three columns, the middle one going in the opposite direction from the other two. At first came the Reichsdeutsche from the various Gaus [regions]; then the Sudetendeutsche. I never expect to see such scenes again as when the Sudetendeutsch women arrived. You will have read about it in the papers but the accounts I saw seemed to bear no relation to what actually happened. Really everyone was crying & I thought they would never sort out the muddle when the marchers broke ranks & surrounded the Führer in a seething mass, & those who had already passed came running back to try & see the Führer once more, & they were all sobbing & stretching out their hands & some of them managed to shout in chorus ‘Lieber Führer, wann kommst Du zu uns?’ and ‘Führer, wir schwören Dir aufs Neu, wir bleiben Dir auf ewig treu’.⁵ Henlein stood beside the Führer and it must have been his greatest day.

Well after that was over we went into the hotel & I went up to a room & lay down. The lade with me was in her element, as she is very pretty & very loud & coy with the Umgebung & Begleitung [staff] & calls them all ‘du’, from Sepp Dietrich⁶ to the chauffeurs. I was able to sleep till 3 & then we had to leave for a stadium outside the town where there were very wonderful demonstrations of Leibesubüngen, etc, including a dance by 5,000 women & club-swinging by 15,000. We had to leave early so as to get to the Flugplatz [airport] before the Führer, our planes left at 8, I didn’t go in the Führer’s because I was suddenly terrified I would give him my flu. We landed at Nürnberg & drove in Kolonne in ten huge cars to Bayreuth. After we arrived a car was sent round to take me to dinner but of course I felt like death & couldn’t go. Well ever since then I have been in bed, & have missed Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. Siegfried I would have missed anyhow as it was the day we started for Breslau.

On Monday night – the last night he was here – when the Führer heard I was ill, he sent me the most lovely huge bouquet of roses, & the next morning he sent round to enquire how I was. Then he left by plane for Berlin. It seems that when he left he told Frau Wagner⁷ I was ill & would she look after me a bit & send a doctor. Also, that he wanted all bills to be sent to him. Isn’t he really too sweet for words. Someone even came – I don’t know who – to say I was to be given back all the money I had spent on oranges etc. I am really so terribly grateful to him.

Well yesterday Frau Wagner came & brought the hugest & most lovely bouquet of garden flowers I ever saw, evidently picked by herself, & it makes my room smell like a garden. She was awfully nice & motherly, & said she would send a doctor.

A large bouquet arrived tied with two broad red satin ribbons with Hakenkreuzes [swastikas] on them – the sort of thing one puts on Horst Wessel’s grave – from the Lord Mayor of Bayreuth, whom so far as I know I have never met. All the flowers make one much more cheerful. Also Wollner came & brought a large bunch of gladioli.

Well this letter has got awfully long & may be frightfully dull but I do love writing to pass the time, now that I can sit up. My salvation has been A Passage to India⁸ which thank goodness I hadn’t read before, what a wonderful book, only much too short. I am so grateful to you for telling me about it. Alas I have finished it.

Please give my best love to the boys – did they get my postcards from Breslau? I hope so because they were quite special.

The Führer asked in the train how you were, I said I thought very well, I hope you are.

Well I will now close this weighty letter.

Best love & Heil Hitler! Bobo

¹

The B[urden] of my S[ong] is I am awfully sorry you are ill. I always think to be ill abroad is most un-hochworthy. I hope there is an agreeable Gesellschaft [society] in the town to go and see you, anyway the Fem has gone now. I remember being ill in Napoli and a bearded Doctor laid his bearded face on my bosom which was his old world way of taking my temp. I thought luckily that it was only part of my delirium.

I am getting on well with my German. I know Herrschaft, Tisch and pfui; Pfennig, gemütlich and Rassenschande.² Six words which would get one a long way if made good use of. Oh and mit mir [with me]. Did Muv enjoy her flight? She must be enchanted by the injections you describe. I fear modern science means 0 to her.

Well, head of bone, heart of stone – here is a little poem to show you what a lot of German I know.

Rassenschande is my joy

(Tisch Tisch and a merry go round)

Gemütlich is my hochgeboren [highborn] boy.

My hochgeboren love sits mit mir

(Tisch Tisch and a merry go round)

With all our Pfennigs we buy delicious beer.

And Rassenschande we do all day

(Tisch Tisch and a merry go round)

For my lover is a geboren Malay.

Pretty good, eh what?

P.S. I saw Bernstein³ who remembered sitting next to you at Emerald’s⁴ and saying, ‘I hate you, I don’t know why’ and you replied ‘But I know why’.

Darling Nard –

Your wonderful cheque arrived today from Pension Doering – you shouldn’t have sent me so much, it’s much too much, but you can imagine how thrilled I was to get it. You are so kind, thank you a million times.

This is the first letter I have been able to write but can’t sit up hence the scrawl. The doctors say I may not be able to go to the Parteitag, so you & I may be in the same boat – tho’ you get a lovely prize for it¹ & I get nothing. I hope however that I may get well quicker than they think & be able to go. The old doctor² the Führer sent me looks like the Aga Khan, he cured the Führer of indigestion. The Führer rang him up in the middle of the night & said he must leave for Bayreuth at once, so he arrived here at 3 A.M. & examined me at once & phoned the Führer. He had to leave several patients in Berlin including – who do you think? – your lover Joan Glover!³ The Führer rings up several times a day from the Berg & speaks to the doctor, & two days ago a phone was brought into my room & I spoke to him, wasn’t it heaven. He sent me a sweet telegram & masses of flowers for my birthday.

Oh dear I envy you all at Wootton, it is so dull here but thank goodness the Fem is here. She flew out, to Farve’s horror. Please give the boys my best love. I do hope I will see them soon.

Best love & Heil Hitler, Bobo

Darling:

How simply dreadful to have had pneumonia; we were so sorry about it. The Führer is the kindest man in the world isn’t he? I bet Joan is teased at his doctor being snatched away. He looks as if he might die any minute I must say. What is the matter with him? Do ask the Doc.

The boys have gone off to Biddesden, looking very well. Kit and I are here alone now. The day before the boys went we were all down by the lake, Kit was fishing, when all of a sudden Debo appeared! Kit had never seen her before. He stayed where he was and Debo and I walked back to the house, and hiding a few hundred yards away were two friends of Debo’s, Lord Andrew Cavendish¹ and a troglodyte of sorts. They had been to some races. They stayed literally ten mins and then scrammed. They all looked as if they had seen a ghost, Debo said they were frightened they might be shot at. Apparently the day before they had come within a few yards of the house and then been too afraid to approach. It seems so odd to think they are grown up; they seemed incredibly babyish and so shy. (Not Debo of course.)

Kit has got such a lovely new rod for spinning minnows, he caught a huge trout last night with it. We are having such heavenly hols.

How too awful if you have to miss the Parteitag, but thank goodness it is the same year as me. I expect you will go but don’t overdo it darling. Come back soon.

You know the grey flannel dress and coat you gave me; well Nanny has let the dress out and it makes the most wonderfully concealing garment for best. I shall have to give it back when you have one. You can’t think how I bless you every time I wear it.

All love darling from Nard

Dear Miss

Poor Boud got beaten up in the Express, did you see (I know you read the papers from cover to cover all except the news, the book reviews or anything of interest). I must say I think it was silly not to write the letter herself but then Boud always is silly.¹

Love from NR

The dr just been says that for two months I mayn’t go in any sort of vehicle, isn’t it deadly. I mayn’t even take a taxi & go out to lunch.²

Darling Diana

Wasn’t it funny – the very day your baby¹ was born I was transcribing letters about Alice Stanley’s² baby & she called it Alexander St George. I recommend St George to your attention, I think it’s so pretty.

I expect you will have a lovely Xmas in bed which I envy you in every way.

Much love from Nancy

I am going to Roy³ & Billa tomorrow, did you know they are having a baby also the David Cecils.⁴

Darling Nard

Thank you for your letter.

I had lunch with the Führer on Sunday & Monday, & he asked me to send you viele Grüsse. Both days he was in his very sweetest mood, particularly on Monday, he held my hand most of the time & looked sweet & said ‘Kind [child]!’ in his sympathetic way because he was so sorry about England & Germany being such enemies.¹ However he said nothing but wonderful things about England & he completely gave me faith again that it will all come right in the end.

Yesterday I visited the new English Consul, he is awfully funny & rather nice.

There is still snow on the ground here, but it’s getting a bit warmer.

Do write soon.

Best love from Bobo

¹

Well, I had lunch with Wolf² today. We are invited to Bayreuth, I don’t know when it begins but will let you know later. He was in his least forthcoming mood, you know, all preoccupied.

He asked after you and Alexander and when I told him Alexander was bald, he said ‘Other people lose their hair through wisdom. He is wise from birth.’ So when I said ‘Let’s hope so’ he said ‘Let’s hope not. It’s better to have hair than wisdom. Weisheit hilft nichts.’³

Darling Nard

Your letter of the 30th just arrived. You can’t think how thrilling it is every time I hear the letterbox click, as I always expect every letter to be the last that will get through.

I listened in to the English news last night, it seems quite hopeless doesn’t it.¹ I wonder if this letter will get through.

I think Chamberlain & co are criminals & should be hanged.

In case you didn’t hear the Führer’s speech, this is what he said about England. ‘Ich habe England immer wieder eine Freundschaft und, wenn notwendig, das engste Zusammengehen angeboten. Aber Liebe kann nicht nur von einer Seite angeboten werden, die muss von der anderen ihre Erwiderung finden.’²

I tried to ring you up last night but was a few hours too late – no more calls to England allowed.

Last night we had blackout for the first time, the streets were so pitchy black one had to feel one’s way. Today I covered all my windows with black paper.

I fear I shan’t see the Führer again. Nardy if anything should happen to me, & the English press try to make some untrue story out of it against W, you will see to it that the truth is known won’t you.

When the war is over, do try to get Boy³ back, I am so worried about him. Baby knows where he is.

Very best love, to you & the boys, from Bobo

I do hope you will feel better soon. It must be awful to be feeling ill just now.

1 Violet Williams-Freeman (1877–1964). A childhood friend of Lady Redesdale, ‘Mrs Ham’ was also a favourite with those she called the ‘Horror Sisters’. The butt of many of their teases, she could be querulous and demanding but her intelligence and sympathy ensured that she remained a cherished friend. After her husband Arthur Hammersley’s death in 1913, she became known as ‘the Widow’ or ‘Wid’, which suited her pessimistic outlook. She lived between Tite Street, Chelsea, and Wilmington, Totland Bay, on the Isle of Wight.

2 When Lord Redesdale learnt that Diana had taken Unity to the Parteitag, the annual Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, he wrote her a furious letter saying that he and Lady Redesdale were ‘absolutely horrified’ that they should accept hospitality from ‘people we regard as a murderous gang of pests’, and begged her to avoid embroiling Unity ‘with matters & people you know we cannot tolerate’. (Lord Redesdale to Diana, 7 September 1933)

3 The Poor Old Female, i.e. Lady Redesdale.

4 Tom Mitford.

5 Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaengl (1887–1975). The Harvard-educated German-American who first encouraged Diana to visit Nazi Germany had been made Foreign Press Secretary in 1931. Alienated from Hitler in 1937, he left Germany for England and later lived in the United States. Married to Helene Neemeyer 1920–36.

6 Ann (Id, Idden) Farrer (1916–95). A first cousin of the Mitfords and lifelong friend and correspondent of Jessica. Worked as an actress and married the actor David Horne in 1941. Author, under the pseudonym Catherine York, of If Hopes Were Dupes (1966), an account of her nervous breakdown.

7 The Poor Old Leader, i.e. Mosley.

8 Desmond Guinness (1931–). Diana’s second son. President of the Irish Georgian Society 1958–91 and author of books on architecture. Married to Princess Mariga von Urach 1954–81 and to Penelope Cuthbertson in 1985.

1 ‘A heavenly evening bag’; a sophisticated present for a thirteen-year-old.

1 Nancy had married Peter (Prod) Rodd (1904–68) in London on 4 December. They were honeymooning in his parents’ flat in Rome.

1 Wigs on the Green (1935). Nancy’s satirical novel, which poked fun at Unity and Diana’s extremism, was the only one of her books never to be reissued after the war. She wrote to Evelyn Waugh, ‘Too much has happened for jokes about Nazis to be regarded as funny or as anything but the worst of taste.’ The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, edited by Charlotte Mosley (Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), p. 249.

2 The Poor Tremorgan Poor Old Female.

3 Dorothy Cordes (1887–1967). Married Lord Redesdale’s younger brother Bertram (Tommy) in 1925.

1 Mosley had addressed a huge audience at Olympia, Kensington, where violent fights broke out between Blackshirts and communists. Diana was unable to attend the meeting because she had a high fever.

2 William Anstruther-Gray (1905–85). Conservative MP who co-signed a letter to The Times accusing the uniformed Blackshirts at Olympia of ‘wholly unnecessary violence’.

3 Adolf Hitler (1889–1945). Eighteen months after his appointment as Chancellor, the Führer’s Nazification of Germany was well under way.

4 Derek Hill (1916–2000). Painter, notable for his portraits and landscapes, who was studying stage design in Munich.

5 ‘The kittens’; i.e. Diana’s two sons, Jonathan and Desmond.

1 Ottilie (Tilly) Losch (1907–75). Austrian dancer and actress who had been a girlfriend of Tom. Married the capricious poet and collector Edward James in 1931 and sued for separation in 1934, charging him with homosexuality among other things. James scandalized everyone by counter-suing, accusing her of adultery with Prince Serge Obolensky.

2 The Daily Express was waging a vendetta against Hanfstaengl for expelling their Munich correspondent, and reported that on a visit to America he had fallen in love with a nightclub hostess and invited her to Germany where he would ‘personally supervise’ her career. (20 June 1934)

3 The Nazi Party headquarters in Munich.

4 Ernst Röhm (1887–1934). Chief of Staff of the Sturmabteilung (SA), a large, unruly army that constituted a potential threat to Hitler’s dictatorship. On 30 June, in the Night of the Long Knives, Röhm and members of his staff were dragged from their beds and shot, ostensibly for plotting a coup.

5 Josef Goebbels (1897–1945). Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda since March 1933. Married his secretary, Magda Ritschel-Friedländer, in 1931.

6 Kurt von Schleicher (1882–1934). The former Chancellor of Germany and his wife were murdered by the SS in Berlin on 30 June.

7 Edmund Heines (1898–1934). The SA commander who, like Röhm, was a homosexual, was also executed for his part in the alleged plot.

1 Lady Redesdale’s maid who ran up the sisters’ evening dresses for £1 a time.

2 Wigs on the Green.

3 Nancy had written an ambivalent article in which she began by decrying Britain’s ‘decaying democracy’ that could be saved only by a ‘great Leader’, before going on to lampoon Mosley in the same mocking tones that she had used in Wigs on the Green. ‘Fascism as I See It’, Vanguard, July 1934.

4 Unity, Jessica and Lady Redesdale had attended the 300th anniversary performance of the Passionsspiel, the annual re-enactment of Christ’s Passion performed at Oberammergau, where Hitler was also present.

Jessica (left) on her second visit to Germany, with Unity. Weilheim, 1935.

5 Lady Redesdale.

1 Lady Redesdale considered it too expensive to keep a governess just for Deborah and had enrolled her as a day girl at Wychwood, a weekly boarding school in Oxford, where she lasted for just one term.

2 A newsreel at the cinema was showing a short interview with Mosley. Diana complained that in order to see it twice she twice had to sit through a boring documentary called Amazing Maize.

1 Mosley had brought a libel case against the Daily Star for reporting that his movement was ready to ‘take over government with machine guns when the moment arrived’. He was awarded £5,000 damages.

2 Count Serge Orloff-Davidoff (d.1945). Married Elisabeth Scott-Ellis in 1935.

1 Derek Hill.

1 Jessica.

2 Penelope Chetwode (1910–86). Writer and traveller. Married the poet John Betjeman in 1933. They lived at Uffington, not far from Swinbrook.

3 Unity had presented Hitler with a collage she had made of Hannibal crossing the Alps.

4 Nancy’s nickname for Unity. Horst Wessel (1907–30) was an SA storm trooper murdered by communist sympathizers in a private quarrel. Goebbels exploited his death and transformed him into a martyr. A poem written by Wessel and set to music became the marching song of the SA and later the official song of the Nazi Party.

1 Cecily Fenwick; a friend of Lady Redesdale.

2 A noisy beer hall with a rustic cabaret that performed Bavarian dances.

3 On 9 February, Unity had met Hitler for the first time at the Osteria Bavaria.

4 Wilhelm Brückner (1884–1954). Hitler’s chief adjutant.

5 Probably diplomatic notes that were being exchanged following Hitler’s violation of the military clauses of the Treaty of Versailles.

6 Jakob Werlin (1886–1958). An SS regional commander and manager of Daimler-Benz in Munich who supplied Hitler with Mercedes cars.

7 Julius Stadelmann; one of Hitler’s junior adjutants.

1 Unity had been apprehensive about introducing Tom to Hitler as he was anti-Nazi – or lukewarm towards Nazi policies at best – and was not an anti-Semite. Although Unity tried to reassure Diana that Tom had been won over by meeting Hitler, Diana remained uncertain of her brother’s allegiance. When Hitler extended an invitation to Tom for the 1936 Parteitag, Unity wrote to Diana, ‘Oh Nardy please don’t think it’s my fault because it really isn’t, it was his [Hitler’s] own idea.’ A year later, however, she wrote to Diana that she was composing a verse to celebrate Tom’s conversion.

2 Joachim ‘von’ Ribbentrop (1893–1946). Hitler’s foreign affairs adviser since 1933. Appointed ambassador to London in August 1936 and Reich Foreign Minister in 1938. Unity and Diana both disliked him and regarded him as a poor choice for ambassador.

3 Erna Hanfstaengl; Putzi’s sister, whom he once referred to as ‘a good girl’, worked in the family shop selling prints of Old Masters. She often invited Unity to stay at her cottage at Uffing near Munich.

1 A Burford antique shop.

1 Unity had addressed the annual Nazi festival at Hesselberg where she expressed sympathy with the German people and admiration for the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews. She also gave an interview to a Munich newspaper about the BUF and its anti-Semitic stance.

2 Hermann Göring (1893–1946). The most powerful man in the Third Reich after Hitler was present at the Hesselberg rally. Nancy was parodying Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘The May Queen’ (1833): ‘You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear … For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother.’

3 Germany’s first concentration camp had been opened at Dachau in March 1933 by Heinrich Himmler (1900–45), head of the Gestapo and Waffen-SS. The first prisoners were political detainees, rounded up after the burning of the Reichstag.

4 William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook (1879–1964). The politician, financier and newspaper proprietor campaigned for appeasement with Germany.

1 Diana had been involved in a car crash in which her face was badly injured.

1 This letter was transcribed in Lady Redesdale’s unpublished memoir of Unity. The orìginal has not been found.

2 Jessica and Unity left on a ten-day sightseeing tour of Germany on 24 September.

3 Although they both knew the invented language, it was unusual for Jessica and Unity to communicate in Honnish rather than Boudledidge.

4 ‘In spite of all.’

5 For the second time in two years, Diana had aborted a child she was expecting with Mosley.

1 Erich Widmann; Unity’s SS boyfriend who worked in a photography shop.

2 Ella van Heemstra (1900–84). Dutch-born mother of the actress Audrey Hepburn. She and her English husband, Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, were both keen BUF members at the time.

3 Michael Burn (1912–). A young reporter on the Gloucester Citizen who had met Unity in London. An initial enthusiasm for Hitler soon turned to disenchantment. He was imprisoned in Colditz during the war and became a convert to Marxism.

4 A waitress at the Osteria Bavaria.

5 Hitler suffered from a chronic stomach condition.

6 Heinrich Hoffmann (1885–1957). Hitler’s official photographer and author of The Hitler Nobody Knows (1933).

7 Otto Dietrich (1897–1952). Hitler’s press chief 1933–45.

8 ‘Just ran away.’

9 James Rennell Rodd, 1st Baron Rennell (1858–1941). Nancy’s father-in-law was a diplomat, poet and scholar. Married Lilias Guthrie in 1894. He and his wife attended the 1936 Olympic Games.

10 ‘The most beautiful moment of my life.’

1 Lady Redesdale had taken Jessica and Deborah to Paris for a few weeks.

2 Liliane (Baba) d’Erlanger (1902–45). A girlfriend of Tom Mitford. Married Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge in 1923.

3 A Mitford word for spaniel, hence anything very sweet.

4 The Duke of Gloucester (1900–74), third son of King George V, and Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott (1901–2004) were married on 6 November 1935.

1 Ann Farrer.

2 ‘Love forever, Your Boud.’

1 Max Schmeling (1905–2005). German world heavyweight boxing champion 1930–32. In June 1936, he beat Joe Louis in his first fight against the black American heavyweight champion.

2 Eva Baum was a keen Nazi who taught German to Unity. Having been friends, they fell out when Baum reported Unity to the SS, claiming, amongst other things, that she was bloodthirsty and had an ‘hysterical’ passion for Hitler. She also reported that Unity was having ‘a real affair’ with Erich Widmann and that she was not a suitable friend for an SS member. (Unity to Diana, 8 February 1935) The rumour that Unity had in turn denounced Baum for being Jewish is not borne out by this letter.

3 An SS doctor who ran a children’s clinic in Munich.

4 Armida (1917–) and Rosemary (1918–) Macindoe were English sisters studying German in Munich.

1 7th Marquess of Londonderry (1878–1949). Until 1938, the former Air Minister was an admirer of Hitler and worked for rapprochement with Germany. His wife, Edith, was more sceptical and saw that ‘to live in the upper levels of National Socialism may be quite pleasant, but woe to the poor folk who do not belong to the upper orders’. (Quoted in Anne de Courcy, Circe, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992, p. 270) After their visit to Germany, the Londonderrys and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Mairi, left bearing photographs of the Nazi leaders in silver frames, which may have made Unity jealous.

2 Mary Pollen (1892–1983). Married Colonel J. D. Macindoe in 1915 and K. W. Newall in 1933. Contrary to what Unity believed, the mother of her friends Armida and Rosemary was not an admirer of Hitler.

3 Rudolf Hess (1894–1987). Deputy leader of the Nazi Party since 1933.

4 Mary Wooddisse; an exact contemporary and close friend of Unity who was also studying German in Munich.

5 A small gathering.’

6 Paula Hitler (1896–1960). Hitler’s younger sister was the only one of his five full siblings to survive to adulthood.

1 Lady Redesdale transcribed this letter in her unpublished memoir of Unity. The original has not been found.

2 Lady Redesdale was taking Unity, Jessica and Deborah on a cultural cruise of the Mediterranean.

1 Jessica was on holiday in Brittany with Nancy and Peter.

2 As children, Jessica and Deborah imagined that Anthony Sewell, a neighbour at Rutland Gate, was a white-slave trader – their nanny having warned them that London was the centre of the traffic. Sewell was married, 1930–45, to Mary Lutyens, daughter of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.

3 ‘Popo is sixty, she is guaranteed for a hundred.’

4 It is more likely that Nancy stayed at home because her husband and Mary Sewell were having an affair.

1 Alexandra Cecilia Hay (1922–91). A friend of Deborah who did lessons with her at Swinbrook.

2 Peter Ramsbotham (1919–). The future distinguished diplomat had made friends with the sisters during their Mediterranean cruise.

3 Unity had cancelled her plan to travel down the Danube and on to Constantinople with Tom and Jessica because the Redesdales had forbidden Jessica to go.

4 Deborah’s dachshund.

5 Ivan Hay (1884–1936). Cecilia’s father.

1 Magda Ritschel-Friedländer (1901–45). The ideal of German motherhood married Dr Joseph Goebbels in 1931 in order to be close to Hitler, whom she idolized. Her first marriage in 1921 to Gunther Quandt, a rich industrialist, ended in 1929.

2 ‘Kitten’; Diana’s nickname for Mosley.

3 Diana’s marriage had been postponed until 6 October while the official paperwork was being arranged.

4 W. E. D. Allen (1901–73). Chairman of an advertising company and Ulster MP for West Belfast who resigned his seat in 1931 to take up a senior post in Mosley’s New Party. He may also have been reporting back on the Mosleys to British intelligence services.

5 Lillian Harvey (1907–68). The English-born actress spent her youth in Germany before moving to Hollywood in 1933. She released two films in 1936, Glückskinder and Schwarze Rosen.

6 ‘It has given me such pleasure that you came to the Party Rally and that you have attended every day.’

7 ‘The lackey of the Jews has almost become a National Socialist.’

8 ‘Your brother is a splendid young man.’

9 Count Janos von Almasy (1893–1968). An Hungarian friend of Tom who lived at Bernstein Castle in the Austrian province of Burgenland. Tom introduced him to Unity who often stayed at Bernstein and became Janos’s lover. Married Princess Maria Esterhazy in 1929.

10 Goebbels had recently bought a villa in the fashionable Berlin suburb and it is there that the Mosleys’ wedding lunch was given.

11 Ribbentrop. Tom Mitford had made up the nickname, inspired, for no particular reason, by the medieval song, ‘Go to Joan Glover, and tell her I love her and at the mid of the moon I will come to her’.

1 Robert Gordon-Canning was best man at Mosley’s wedding. Joined the BUF in 1934 before breaking with it in 1938 on personal grounds.

2 Hitler presented Diana with a large signed photograph of himself in a silver frame.

3 Maria Goebbels; Dr Goebbels’ younger sister lived with her brother until she married the film director Max W. Kimmich in 1938.

4 Diana was unable to remember the exact reasons for this quarrel but could only suppose that Mosley was irritated by her admiration for Hitler. In her appointment diary for 10 October 1936, four days after her wedding, she noted, ‘We discuss H and the wedding, He compares H with Ramsay MacDonald. I am furious. We quarrel.’

5 Hitler had addressed a meeting of the Winterhilfswerk, a Nazi charity that raised money to help the poor during the winter months.

1 Adolf Wagner (1890–1944). Nazi provincial chief of Munich and Upper Bavaria; Bavarian Interior Minister from 1933.

2 Gertrud Scholtz-Klink (1902–99). Reich Women’s Leader and the only woman to reach ministerial status in the Nazi Party.

1 Diana was in Berlin trying to get Hitler’s agreement to Mosley’s plan to set up a commercial radio station in Germany to broadcast to Britain.

2 It is not clear why Diana could not write to her son at the time.

3 Wootton Lodge. An article in Country Life had described the house as ‘the home of the unexpected’.

4 ‘You certainly are a good soul.’

1 The news of Jessica’s elopement had at last reached the Redesdales, two weeks after her disappearance.

2 Hitler.

3 ‘Hen’ in ‘Honnish’, Jessica and Deborah’s private language.

4 Esmond Romilly (1918–41). In her memoirs, Jessica described Esmond when she first met him as ‘a star around which everything revolved … He represented to me all that was bright, attractive and powerful’. Hons and Rebels, p. 105.

5 Clementine Mitford (1915–2005). Posthumous daughter of Lord Redesdale’s eldest brother, Clement. Married Sir Alfred Beit in 1939.

1 Nancy and Peter had returned from Bayonne where they had tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Jessica to come home.

2 Nancy had endeavoured to persuade Jessica to hide in the train lavatory to avoid the press.

1 The Redesdales refused to allow seventeen-year-old Deborah to visit Diana while her marriage to Mosley was still a secret and in the eyes of the world she was ‘living in sin’.

2 John Beckett (1894–1964), ex-Labour MP, and William Joyce (1906–46) had been dismissed from their positions in the BUF, which was in financial trouble and was sacking many of its employees. After the war, Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) was accused of high treason for broadcasting from Germany – where he had fled to avoid arrest – and was executed.

3 Frank Buchman (1878–1961). Founder of the Oxford Group, a fundamentalist religious movement renamed Moral Rearmament in 1938. In 1936, Buchman had publicly thanked heaven for the existence of Hitler as a defence against communism.

4 Reginald Holme; author of memoirs, A Journalist for God (1995).

1 ‘Thanks for your letter.’

2 Dorothy (Weenie) Bowles (1885–1971). Lady Redesdale’s disapproving younger sister. Married Percy Bailey in 1907.

3 ‘Best love from.’

1 Deborah could not remember the origin of the rush of fantastic nicknames she and Jessica used in their letters to each other at the time of the elopement. They were perhaps a way of trying to re-establish their relationship which had been so shaken by Jessica’s disappearance.

2 Lady Redesdale, worried that Jessica seemed depressed, had been planning to take Deborah and her on a world cruise in March.

3 Derek Jackson (1906–82). Distinguished physicist, amateur jockey and heir to the News of the World. Married Pamela, as the second of his six wives, in December 1936. They were divorced in 1951. In 1940 he joined the RAF, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1941. The following year he transferred to Fighter Command and was decorated with the Air Force Cross.

4 Gerald Tyrwhitt, 14th Baron Berners (1883–1950). Composer, painter and writer. A friend of both Nancy, who depicted him as Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love (1945), and Diana, who wrote an appreciation of him in Loved Ones (1985). He lived at Faringdon House, Berkshire.

5 Robert Heber-Percy (1911–87). Known as the ‘Mad Boy’ because of his wild behaviour. Married twice, to Jennifer Fry, 1942–7, and to Lady Dorothy Lygon in 1985, but his liaisons were mostly with men, principally with Gerald Berners whom he met in 1932 and with whom he carried on a stormy relationship for eighteen years.

1 George Howard (1920–84). A cousin of both Esmond Romilly and the Mitfords. Chairman of the BBC 1980–83.

2 Dolly Wilde (1895–1941). Witty lesbian niece of Oscar Wilde. The sisters used to tease their mother by pretending to be in love with her.

3 Michael Farrer (1920–68). A first cousin of the Mitfords.

4 Winston Churchill (1874–1965). The statesman was related through his wife, Clementine Hozier, to both Esmond Romilly and the Mitfords. There was also a rumour in some circles that he was Esmond’s father.

1 Unity had kept in touch with Baroness Laroche with whom she lodged when first in Munich.

1 King George VI, who succeeded to the throne after the abdication of his brother Edward VIII, was crowned on 12 May 1937.

2 In 1936, Peter Nevile, a friend of Jessica and Esmond, tried to stage a demonstration in favour of Edward VIII at a time when the government was putting pressure on the king to give up Wallis Simpson or abdicate.

3 When the publicity surrounding Jessica’s elopement was at its height, Peter Nevile sold an interview with Esmond to the News Chronicle. Esmond and Nevile shared the proceeds.

1 Georgina Wernher (1919–). Daughter of Sir Harold Wernher of Lubenham Hall, Leicestershire, one of the richest men in England, and Lady Zia, daughter of Grand Duke Michael of Russia. Married Harold Phillips in 1944.

2 Lady Iris Mountbatten (1920–82). Great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

3 Lady Jean Ogilvy (1918–2004). A cousin of the Mitfords and the eldest daughter of the 12th Earl of Airlie, who lived at Cortachy Castle in Scotland. Married 2nd Baron Lloyd in 1942.

1 Lady Margaret Ogilvy (1920–). Daughter of the 12th Earl of Airlie and a great friend of Deborah. Married Sir Iain Tennant in 1946.

1 From the windows of the Marlborough Club, Deborah could watch the coronation procession on its way to Westminster Abbey. As a peer of the realm, Lord Redesdale attended the service with Lady Redesdale, who was dressed in coronation robes of ermine-trimmed crimson velvet with a three-foot train.

2 Phyllis Earle; a hairdresser and beauty parlour in Dover Street.

3 Tom Mitford.

1 A necklace and earrings of pearls and amethysts.

2 Nellie Hozier (1888–1955). Esmond’s mother was a first cousin of Lord Redesdale and a sister-in-law of Winston Churchill. Married Bertram Romilly in 1915.

1 Countess Francesca (Baby) Palffy-Erdödy a girlfriend of Tom Mitford, and her older sister, Johanna (Jimmy), were friends of Unity and lived at Kohfidisch, Austria.

2 Angela Brazil (1868–1947). Prolific author of racy books about schoolgirls.

1 A letter from Deborah sent on 16 May from Florence.

2 Henrietta (Tello) Shell (1864–1950). Governess to Lady Redesdale and her siblings when they were children. After their mother’s death in 1887, she became their father’s mistress, bore him three sons and assumed the name Mrs John Stewart. In 1894 she became editor of The Lady, a position she occupied for twenty-five years.

3 Lady Redesdale’s unusual Christian name came from one of her father’s half-sisters, Sydney Isabella, who was a goddaughter of Sydney, Lady Morgan, the nineteenth-century Irish novelist.

4 Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel was banned on publication in 1928 and not republished in Britain until 1949.

1 Barnabas von Géczy (1897–1971). Hungarian-born leader of one of the most popular swing orchestras of the time. Deborah’s admiration for him was reciprocated: when Unity saw the band the following year, Géczy whispered into her ear, ‘Wheer ees Debo?’ (Unity to Lady Redesdale, 12 July 1938).

2 Franchot Tone (1905–68). Suave American actor who starred in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Married to Joan Crawford 1935–9.

3 Maurice Chevalier (1888–1972). Actor who played the quintessential Frenchman in 1930s American cinema.

4 Deborah’s whippets.

5 Lady Elizabeth Wellesley (1918–). Daughter of the 7th Duke of Wellington.

1 Deborah had sued the Daily Express for saying that she, not Jessica, had eloped with Esmond. The case was settled out of court and Deborah was awarded £1,000.

1 After the sale of Swinbrook, Lord Redesdale rented a cottage in the village so that he could continue fishing on the Windrush.

2 Terence O’Connor (1891–1940). Conservative MP and Solicitor-General 1936–40. A keen follower of the Heythrop, he died after straining his heart on the hunting field. Married Cecil Cook in 1920.

1 Tom Driberg (1905–76). Labour MP, author and journalist. Since 1933 he had been the ‘William Hickey’ gossip columnist on the Daily Express. The press suspected that Diana and Mosley were married but were unable to find proof. Of the family, only the Redesdales, Unity and Tom knew about the marriage; Nancy, who was incapable of keeping a secret, had not been told.

2 ‘The Poor Old Leader’, i.e. Mosley.

3 Lord Redesdale’s favourite term of abuse derived from ‘suar’, meaning ‘pig’ in Hindi, a word he learnt when he worked as a tea planter in Ceylon.

1 From a popular song of 1937, ‘Somebody Stole my Gal’.

1 Lady Redesdale, whose admiration for Nelson was as great as her distrust of the medical profession, used to give lectures at the Women’s Institute on bread-making.

1 When one of the Mitford children’s guinea pigs was pregnant, the sisters called it ‘in pig’, as ‘in foal’, and used the expression for humans and animals alike.

1 ‘The Parent Birds’, i.e. the Redesdales.

2 Nancy’s French bulldog.

1 Dorothy L. Sayers’ eleventh thriller featuring Lord Peter Wimsey (1937).

1 Hitler’s autobiography, My Struggle, was first published in two volumes, in 1925 and 1926.

2 Annemarie Ortaus; a keen German follower of Moral Rearmament whom Diana had met in Munich.

3 Miles Phillimore (1915–72). Author of Just for Today, a Moral Rearmament pamphlet (1940).

4 Vivien Mosley (1921–2002). Diana’s stepdaughter. Married Desmond Forbes-Adam in 1949.

5 Nicholas Mosley, 3rd Baron Ravensdale (1923–). Diana’s stepson became a novelist and biographer. His books include Accident (1964), Julian Grenfell (1976), Hopeful Monsters (1990) and a two-volume life of his father, Rules of the Game (1982) and Beyond the Pale (1983). Married to Rosemary Salmon 1947–74 and to Verity Raymond in 1974.

6 The Princesses Edda and Carmen von Wrede were twin daughters of a German father and Argentinian mother. They lived at Schloss Fantaisie near Bayreuth and had been friends of Unity’s since 1935.

1 The celebrated exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’, comprising pictures that had been removed from state collections, was designed to educate the Germans on the ‘evils’ of modern art. Works by Max Beckmann, Chagall, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, Kandinsky and Nolde attracted five times as many visitors as a show of Nazi-approved art held at the same time.

1 The wife of Benno von Arent (1898–1956), Hitler’s favourite theatre designer.

2 ‘But Decca was so nice! She was so funny and charming!’

3 The city park in the centre of Munich where two years later Unity attempted to commit suicide.

1 ‘Really too stupid, much too easy.’

2 ‘But you’ve only got to think logically, I’d have guessed it in two minutes.’

3 ‘Fiery red.’

4 ‘A full-bodied wine.’

* I have marked my own contributions with a star.

5 ‘Landscape.’

6 ‘A tall, beautiful blonde woman.’

7 Harald Quandt (1921–67). Magda Goebbels’ son by her first marriage.

8 ‘But children, it’s obvious, it couldn’t be anyone else.’

9 ‘I was thinking of the Führer all along, but he drinks only water!’

10 Leo Schlageter (1894–1923). A Nazi martyr executed by the French for resisting their forces in the Ruhr.

11 I’m thinking of my mother; she’d have understood hardly anything; it must be absolutely clear for the simplest and stupidest people.’

12 Fritz Wiedemann (1891–1970). Hitler’s immediate superior during the First World War and subsequently one of his military aides and policy advisers.

1 Mussolini’s state visit to Germany, during which Hitler put on a massive display of military power, was instrumental in convincing the Italian dictator to join forces with Germany.

2 Karl Brandt (1904–1947). Surgeon who joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and served as Hitler’s doctor 1934–44.

3 George Ward Price (1886–1961). Munich correspondent for the Daily Mail and author of I Know These Dictators (1937), a sympathetic portrait of Hitler and Mussolini.

4 Margaret Mitchell’s bestseller had been published the previous year.

1 Rosaleen, Bryan and Elizabeth Guinness’s first child, was born on 7 September 1937.

1 Lady Bridget Coke (1891–1984). Mother of Deborah’s great friend Margaret (Maggot) Ogilvy. Married the 12th Earl of Airlie in 1917.

1 Deborah’s Christmas present to Nancy was a bracelet of Hand of Fatima charms.

2 The attack of measles had affected Deborah’s eyes. The sisters used to tease each other about syphilis, which can lead to blindness in its later stages.

3 Helen Eaton (1899–1989). Nancy’s nickname for her hostess at West Wycombe was ‘Hell Bags’. Married Sir John Dashwood in 1922.

4 ‘Get on’, Deborah’s way of addressing Nancy, was an interpretation of the sort of growl that the Mitfords’ groom used to greet people with. Deborah took it up as a way of fighting back at her eldest sister.

5 When Deborah was small, Nancy used to tease her with a rhyme that never failed to make her little sister cry: ‘A little houseless match, it has no roof, no thatch / It lies alone, it makes no moan, that little, houseless match’. She put the poem into The Pursuit of Love, where it induced ‘rivers of tears’ in the heroine, Linda.

1 Jessica’s daughter, Julia, was born on 20 December.

2 Esmond had found work as a copywriter with a London advertising agency.

1 The foreign policy speech that Hitler made four days later gave encouragement to the Austrian Nazi Party.

2 Kurt von Schuschnigg (1897–1977). Anti-Nazi Chancellor of Austria since 1934. Hitler threatened to invade Austria unless concessions were made to the Nazi Party. Schuschnigg resigned and in March 1938 Germany annexed Austria.

3 ‘Have you heard? Schuschnigg is with the Führer.’

4 ‘Over there in the Reich.’

1 Jessica and Esmond’s baby daughter, Julia, had just died from measles, aged five months. They had decided to go to Corsica for three months to try to recover.

1 Lord Redesdale’s visits to Germany to see Unity had led him to revise his opinion of Nazism and, until Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939, he was sympathetic to the regime. In a speech to the House of Lords, he had announced that the Anschluss was the ‘sincere desire’ of a large majority of Austrians and that the gratitude of Europe was due to Hitler for averting bloodshed.

1 Unity had flirted with the French officer when the sisters visited Corsica during their cruise of the Mediterranean in 1936.

2 ‘Boud, I hope you haven’t forgotten your Boud.’

3 Frances Mitford (1875–1951). Lord Redesdale’s eldest sister who was popular with all her nieces. Married Alexander (Alec) Kearsey in 1907.

4 ‘A pretty woman’s hairstyle.’

1 The Berghof was Hitler’s mountain retreat at Obersalzberg, which he had converted from a simple Alpine house into a residence suitable for receiving foreign dignitaries.

2 The annexation of Austria.

3 ‘Only much cleaner.’

4 ‘She’s delighted to hear you say that.’ Unity’s dislike of Italians was a running joke between her and Hitler.

5 Wilhelm Ohnesorge (d. 1962). German Minister of Posts and Telegraphs who was sympathetic to the Mosleys’ plan to set up a radio station.

6 ‘Where is your sister?’

7 Julius Schaub; Hitler’s personal adjutant and former head of his bodyguard.

8 Gerdy Troost (1904–2003). Interior designer and a confidante of Hitler. Married to Paul Ludwig Troost (1878–1934), one of Hitler’s favourite architects.

9 ‘Of course it’s a disadvantage for me because if I drive that fast I get there twenty minutes early, then I have to sit and wait in my hotel or at home for twenty minutes.’

1 The Sudeten-German Party of Czechoslovakia, led by Konrad Henlein (1898–1945) who was instrumental in preparing the way for Hitler’s occupation of his country in 1939.

2 Georg Wollner; Gauleiter of Reichenberg.

3 ‘Because I have to bring the Führer out.’

4 ‘The Führer is coming! The Führer is coming!’

5 ‘It is a pleasure and an honour for me to greet you, my Führer.’

6 Willy Kannenberg; Hitler’s cook.

7 Franz Gürtner (1881–1941). Reich Minister of Justice since 1932 who opposed Nazi brutality but was unable to stand up to Hitler.

8 ‘Next time the judges let that sort of man free, I’ll have him arrested by my bodyguards and sent to a concentration camp; then we’ll see who is stronger, the letter of Herr Gürtner’s law or my machine guns!’

9 Dr Leopold von Hoesch (1881–1936). German ambassador to London 1932–6.

1 Hitler’s special train.

2 Gerhardt Wagner (1888–1938). Reich Medical Leader who was instrumental in formulating the infamous Nuremberg Laws that established anti-Semitism and euthanasia as official Nazi policy.

3 Arthur Seyss-Inquart (1892–1946). Leader of the Austrian Nazi Party and keen supporter of Austria’s union with Germany, who became governor of Austria after the Anschluss.

4 Hans von Tschammer-Osten (1887–1943). Reich Sports Leader and president of the German Olympic Committee in 1936.

5 ‘Dear Führer, when are you coming to us?’ and ‘Führer, once again we swear undying loyalty to you’.

6 Joseph (Sepp) Dietrich (1892–1966). Hitler’s close associate and head of his SS bodyguard.

7 Winifred Williams (1897–1980). The English-born wife of Richard Wagner’s son, Siegfried, had been a friend and ardent admirer of Hitler since 1923. In 1930, she became head of the Bayreuth Festival and ran it until the end of the war.

8 E. M. Forster’s novel was first published in 1924.

1 This letter was transcribed in Lady Redesdale’s memoir of Unity. The original has not been found.

2 ‘Power, table and ugh; penny cosy and racial disgrace,’ (i.e. interracial sex).

3 Henry Bernstein (1876–1953). French boulevard-theatre playwright.

4 Maud Burke (1872–1948). American-born widow of Sir Bache Cunard, the shipping-line magnate, whom she married in 1895. Changed her name to ‘Emerald’ in 1926 and was one of London’s leading society hostesses between the wars.

1 Diana was expecting a baby in November.

2 Theodor Morell (1886–1948). Hitler’s private physician.

3 Ribbentrop.

1 Lord Andrew Cavendish (1920–2004). Succeeded as nth Duke of Devonshire in 1950. Deborah’s future husband was a student at Cambridge when they first met.

1 Unity had written to the Daily Express to deny an article in ‘William Hickey’ which said that ‘those members of Britain’s governing class whose Aryanism has been okayed by Unity Mitford are packing their bags for Nuremberg’. (2 September 1938) A photograph of her letter accompanying the article shows that it had been signed by Unity but was in Lady Redesdale’s handwriting.

2 After more than four years of marriage, Nancy was at last expecting a child but in spite of carefully following her doctor’s instructions, she miscarried a few weeks later.

1 Diana’s son, Alexander (Al) Mosley (1938–2005), was born on 26 November.

2 Nancy was editing the letters of her ancestors Maria Josepha, Lady Stanley of Alderley, and Henrietta Maria Stanley. Published as The Ladies of Alderley (1938) and The Stanleys of Alderley (1939).

3 Roy Harrod (1900–78). Influential economist who taught at Christ Church, Oxford. Married Wilhelmine (Billa) Cresswell in 1938.

4 Lord David Cecil (1902–86). Biographer and professor of English Literature at Oxford 1948–70. Married Rachel McCarthy in 1932. Their son Jonathan was born in 1939.

1 Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March violated the Munich Agreement and had brought all efforts at appeasement to an end.

1 This extract was transcribed in Lady Redesdale’s memoir of Unity. The original has not been found.

2 The cover name used by Hitler at the beginning of his political career and adopted as a nickname by his intimates. Neither Unity nor Diana used the name to his face but from 1938 often referred to him as ‘Wolf in letters.

3 ‘Wisdom is no help.’

1 On the previous day, the German army had invaded Poland. Hitler ignored Britain and France’s ultimatum to withdraw and on 3 September Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, declared war.

2 ‘I have proposed friendship to England again and again and, when necessary, the closest collaboration. But love cannot be all one-sided, it must be reciprocated.’

3 Unity’s Great Dane, given to her by Diana.

THREE 1939–1945

Unity, Tom, Deborah, Diana, Jessica, Nancy and Pamela, 1935.

On the afternoon of 3 September 1939, the day that Britain and France declared war on Germany, Unity went to the English Garden in the centre of Munich and put a pistol to her head. The bullet lodged in her brain, failed to kill her but inflicted irreversible damage. She was taken to a Munich hospital were she lay unconscious for several weeks. Communications between England and Germany were difficult in the early part of the war and on Hitler’s orders no report of Unity’s suicide attempt appeared in the German press. It was two months before the Redesdales received any definite news of their daughter and a further two months before they were able to fetch her home from a clinic in neutral Switzerland where Hitler had arranged for her to be sent. In January 1940, Lady Redesdale and Deborah travelled to Bern and found Unity still seriously ill, paralysed, with her hair matted and untouched since the day she had tried to shoot herself. They brought her back to England in an ambulance and Lady Redesdale took on the distressing task of looking after her daughter, who was left with the mental age of a twelve-year-old and in whom religious mania had replaced Hitler mania. Unity’s behaviour was unpredictable, alternating between bouts of fury and moments of pathetic vulnerability, and she was untidy, clumsy and incontinent at night. The Redesdales’ marriage was already under stress from political disagreements – when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia Lord Redesdale reverted to being violently anti-German while Lady Redesdale continued to regard the Führer as Germany’s saviour – and it deteriorated further with the strain of Unity’s infirmity. Lord Redesdale withdrew to Inch Kenneth, a small island off the coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides which he had bought after selling Swinbrook House, taking with him Margaret Wright, the parlourmaid, who became his companion and remained with him until the end of his life. Lady Redesdale took Unity to Mill Cottage in Swinbrook, where they lived for most of the war.

Nancy spent the ‘phoney war’, the months between the declaration of war and Hitler’s invasion of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, working in London at a first-aid post and writing her fourth novel, Pigeon Pie, a comic spy story that did not sell well. Peter joined up, ‘looking very pretty’ in his uniform, and they had a brief retour de flamme which resulted in a second miscarriage for Nancy. It was a depressing time and in her unhappiness she lashed out at her sisters: Deborah was ‘having a wild time with young cannon fodders at the Ritz’; Jessica was attacked for living in America: ‘You must be mad to stay there & like all mad people convinced you are sane’; Unity, whose suicide attempt had not yet reached the ears of her family, was rumoured to be in a concentration camp which was ‘a sort of poetic justice’; Pamela was living at Rignell, ‘in a round of boring gaiety of the neighbourly description’. Where Diana was concerned Nancy exulted when ‘Sir Oswald Quisling’ was imprisoned but thought it quite useless ‘if Lady Q is still at large’. Her hostility towards Diana did not stop at angry words. In June 1940, she was summoned by Gladwyn Jebb, an official at the Foreign Office, to give information on what she knew about Diana’s visits to Germany. She told him that she considered her ‘an extremely dangerous person’. ‘Not very sisterly behaviour’, she admitted to a family friend, ‘but in such times I think it is one’s duty?’ According to an MI5 report of the time, Nancy also informed on Pamela and Derek who she thought should be kept under observation because of being ‘anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and defeatist’.

Although Diana would probably have been interned regardless of Nancy’s character reference, her sister’s testimony must have lent support to the government in their decision to detain her. She was arrested on 29 June 1940 and sent to Holloway, a women’s prison in north London. Diana did not learn of Nancy’s act of disloyalty until 1983, ten years after her death. Had she known, it is likely that she would have cut Nancy out of her life for ever. Even if she had wanted to keep up some kind of communication with her, it is certain that Mosley would have forbidden it. In the event, once Diana was in prison, the five-year estrangement between the two sisters, that had started with Wigs on the Green, began to heal. After the novel’s publication, Nancy had written just twice to Diana, to congratulate her on the births of her two Mosley sons, which, by painful coincidence, had occurred within a few weeks of Nancy’s two miscarriages. While Diana was in Holloway, prison regulations restricted her letter-writing but when she was released in 1943 and was living under house arrest the correspondence between them resumed. This was in spite of Nancy having once again performed her patriotic duty by going to the authorities when the Mosleys’ release was announced and volunteering that in her opinion Diana should not be let out of prison because she ‘sincerely desires the downfall of England and democracy generally’. Diana was never to know about this second betrayal as the government papers in which it was recorded were not made public until four months after her death.

During the first two years of the war, Nancy worked in a canteen for French soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk and later looked after Jewish refugees billeted at Rutland Gate. In 1942, she found a job more to her liking at Heywood Hill, a bookshop in Mayfair, which soon became a meeting place for her London friends. In the same year she met Gaston Palewski, a Free French officer who was General de Gaulle’s right-hand man in London and who very quickly became the love of her life. This cultivated, sophisticated and amusing man was a passionate lover of women and a fiercely loyal supporter of de Gaulle – qualities that made up for his lack of physical charm. The ‘Colonel’, as Nancy always called him, worked the same powerful effect on her as Hitler, Mosley and Esmond had on her sisters. She became as indiscriminately pro-French as Unity had been pro-German; as ready to swallow her pride and put up with Palewski’s infidelities as Diana was with Mosley’s; as convinced that Gaullism was the answer to France’s problems as Jessica was that communism would solve the world’s injustices. Although Palewski was not in love with Nancy – and never pretended to be – he made her feel desired in a way that no other man had. The eight months that their affair lasted before he left to join de Gaulle in Algeria were among the happiest in her life and inspired The Pursuit of Love, the novel that made her famous. It is not clear when Nancy told her sisters about the affair; Palewski is not mentioned in her surviving letters until after the end of the war.

Oswald Mosley’s message to his supporters on 9 May 1940 to ‘resist the foreign invasion with all that is in us’ did not forestall his arrest. On 23 May 1940, he was sent to Brixton Prison under Defence Regulation 18B, which enabled the government to detain without trial anyone suspected of being a threat to the country. Diana, an ‘extremely dangerous and sinister young woman’ according to the Home Office official who signed her detention order, was arrested a month later. In October, she appeared before an Advisory Committee appointed to decide whether she should remain incarcerated. Diana treated her hearing with contempt, as ‘an absurd and insulting farce’, an attitude that she later admitted to regretting. Her loyalty to her friendship with Hitler and her refusal to repudiate Nazi policies led to the recommendation that she be kept locked up. On her arrest, Diana left her two youngest sons, Alexander, who was eighteen months old and Max, who was just eleven weeks and not yet weaned, with their nanny. Lady Redesdale would have taken them to live with her but she was fully occupied caring for Unity, so the children went to live at Rignell with Pamela, whose nickname ‘Woman’ belied the fact – unluckily for the little boys – that she was the least maternal of the sisters. After a year and a half at Rignell, they went with Nanny Higgs as paying guests to the new owners of Swinbrook House. Diana missed her four children terribly and their occasional brief visits were overshadowed by the anguish of having to part with them. But her greatest complaint was being separated from Mosley. Other couples detained under 18B had been moved to married quarters and the Mosleys began to press for permission to be housed together. At the end of 1941, they were reunited in Holloway and lodged in a flat in the prison grounds where they spent two further years in detention. In the autumn of 1943 Mosley contracted phlebitis and the prison doctors reported that his life could be in danger. The Mosleys were released in November and settled at Crux Easton, near Newbury, where they remained under house arrest until the end of the war. The government’s decision to release them was met with a storm of protest and countrywide demonstrations.

Nancy was not the only sister to remonstrate against the decision to free the Mosleys: Jessica wrote to Winston Churchill to demand that they be kept in jail because their release was a ‘direct betrayal of those who have died for the cause of anti-fascism’, and she sent a copy of her letter to the San Francisco Chronicle. In her second volume of memoirs, A Fine Old Conflict, Jessica wrote that on re-reading this letter thirty years later, she found it ‘painfully stuffy and self-righteous’, and noted that Nancy had written condemning her action as ‘not very sisterly’ – the very same words that Nancy had used for her own behaviour when she denounced Diana in 1940. Jessica’s views, as she herself honestly admitted, were mixed with a ‘goodly dash of familial spitefulness’ and with bitterness over Esmond’s death in action in 1941. There is no evidence that Nancy ever told Jessica that she too had denounced Diana, or conceded that in performing her ‘duty’ she might also have been acting with a not insignificant dash of sisterly spite – and without Jessica’s justification of having lost a husband in the fighting.

The Romillys spent their first months in America scraping a living in various occupations; Jessica worked as a salesgirl in a dress shop before landing a job selling Scottish tweeds at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. A clutch of letters of introduction from family and friends helped the couple to make contacts, some of whom, such as Katherine Graham of the Washington Post, were to become lifelong friends. They went to Washington, where Esmond worked as a door-to-door silk-stocking salesman, and then on to Miami, where Jessica found a job selling costume jewellery and Esmond became part owner of a bar with a $1,000 loan from Katherine Graham’s father, the wealthy financier Eugene Meyer. When Chamberlain resigned and Churchill formed a National Government, Esmond decided to join the war effort and signed up with the Canadian Royal Air Force, applying for a commission as a pilot officer. In June 1941, four months after their daughter Constancia was born, Esmond was posted to Britain as an air force navigator. Six months later, a few days before Jessica was planning to join him in England, Esmond was declared missing after his aircraft went down over the North Sea. Winston Churchill, who was on a visit to America to meet Roosevelt, saw Jessica and gave her details of Esmond’s disappearance. He made it clear that there was not the slightest chance that Esmond was being held prisoner of war but Jessica continued to hold out hopes of his survival and it was months before she could accept that he was dead. There are no letters to her sisters to tell of her devastating loss, and in Hons and Rebels his death is recorded in a mere footnote. Jessica buried her grief as her upbringing had taught her and refused to give in to misery or despair. She turned her anger on Diana and her ‘precious friends’. Where previously she had felt revulsion for her sister’s politics, her hatred was now personal. Unity escaped any share of the blame, perhaps because her pitiful state made her impossible to hate.

After Esmond’s death, Jessica decided to stay in America and eventually found a job in the Office of Price Administration, a federal agency established to prevent wartime inflation, where she fell in love with Robert Treuhaft, the son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary who was working as an enforcement attorney and who shared her commitment to radical causes. They were married in the summer of 1943 – in secret, like the Mosleys. After the hounding she had received from the press when she first arrived in America, Jessica was anxious to preserve her new-found anonymity in San Francisco. She wanted to be considered on her own merits and not merely as one of the Mitford girls. In 1944, she forfeited her British citizenship in order to join the American Communist Party and threw herself into tireless fund-raising and recruiting on its behalf. Although Lady Redesdale wrote to her regularly, keeping her informed of family news, Jessica’s contact with her sisters was sporadic. She had made a conscious effort to break away and was carving out a life for herself in deliberate opposition to the world of privilege and prejudice she felt her family represented. Her deep well of feelings for her sisters remained intact, but mistrust had entered their relations and behind the long-standing jokes and teases was a wariness that was never dispelled.

Pamela spent the war years at Rignell where – like Lady Redesdale who in Unity’s little book of questions All About Everybody had put as her favourite occupation ‘woman at the till’ – she kept a close eye on expenditure. Her housekeeping and farming skills came in useful when coping with wartime rationing and labour shortages. In the bitterly cold winter of 1942 when the water tanks for her cattle froze, the youth who had replaced her cowman told her that there was no need to fetch fresh water for the cows since they could eat the snow. Pamela’s experience of running the Biddesden dairy farm had taught her otherwise. ‘How do you know what they want?’ she scolded. ‘You’ve never been an in-calf heifer’. As a leading scientist, Derek would have been exempt from active service but he was determined to join up and volunteered for the Royal Air Force. He went into action in 1941 in a night-fighter squadron and finished the war as a heavily decorated wing commander. When the Mosleys were released in 1943 and had nowhere to live – the lease on Wootton had been surrendered in 1940 – Pamela and Derek immediately offered to take them in, just as they had taken in their two boys at the beginning of the war. Diana never forgot Derek and Pamela’s loyalty, and it brought her closer to her sister than she had been since Biddesden days.

The beginning of the war was a particularly miserable time for nineteen-year-old Deborah. She had travelled with her mother to Switzerland to collect Unity after her suicide attempt and suffered the shock of finding her a completely changed person. She was witness to the increasingly bitter political arguments between the Redesdales and their decision to separate. When Unity came out of hospital, Deborah, except for a few months when she worked in the forces canteen at St Pancras Station, was cooped up with her sister and mother in the small cottage at Swinbrook, or stayed at Inch Kenneth with her grim and physically diminished father. In April 1941, Andrew Cavendish, to whom she had considered herself unofficially engaged for some time, formally proposed and they were married the following month, both aged just twenty-one. Deborah spent the first two years of her marriage following Andrew, who was in the Coldstream Guards, to his different training grounds across the country, living in small pubs and, occasionally, rented houses. She bore three children during the war, two of whom survived: a daughter, Emma, and a son, Peregrine. In 1943, while Andrew was fighting with his battalion in Italy, she moved to The Rookery, a house on the Derbyshire estate of her parents-in-law, where she spent the rest of the war.

Dear Deb Dahlia

Haven’t had a letter from you for ages, what has happened? How are the P[arent Bird]’s – everyone I see asks if they are interned & poor Ld Londonderry has had to deny publicly that he is.

Tell Muv I have written to the Duchess of Aosta & asked her to find out from the wop consul in Munich how & where Boud is. This is very round about & will take time but it should work.

I suppose they are pleased about having the Russians on their side¹ – do note the reactions. Dear me how I regret not having taught you how to write. And what about Hitler’s weapon, is it the Russian air force or some awful gas or bomb? Do they know?

Now be tactful & don’t tell the P’s I asked the trend but I do simply so die to know.

Where is Squalor? Coming home or not or what. I long to write to her & don’t know where.

I am learning to shoot with Rodd’s revolver so that I can be like the Polish grandmothers when the Germo-Russians turn up here which I suppose they will do soon.

Give my love to Blor & mind you write soon.

Love from NR

P.S. Everybody here is being inoculated for all the diseases they can remember as they think H’s policy is bacteriological warfare. I have quite refused as it always makes me so ill.

What is your policy? Now TACT Dahlia & tear this letter up for laud’s sake.

Darling Susan

Here I sit in this awful dark cellar all day from 11–7 & no day off not even Sunday & this is the sixteenth day I’ve been here & I feel as if it were seven years already. It is gas &, therefore, air proof & one has a racking headache after the 1st half hour. I hope you are harrowed.

Susan Stalin how could you let him. Honestly Soo I had such an awful dream, that I was in Harrods & I saw a big crowd so I thought it was the Queen & Q. Mary & when I went to look it was Adolf & Uncle Joe. I woke up yelling.

Peter has a commission in the Welsh Guards. He was offered a job in propaganda but says he must kill Germans. Luckily he won’t go abroad for two months at least. Tud is quartered quite near here & he & Nigel [Birch] come to dinner quite often.

Susan the P’s. The day war broke out I was leaving the Island¹ & Muv was taking me to the station & I said something only fairly rude about Hitler & she said ‘get out of this car & walk to the station then’, so after that I had to be honey about Adolf. Then later I said Peter had joined up so she said ‘I expect he’ll be shot soon’, which I thought fairly tactless of her.

Altogether she is acting very queer. Farve has recanted in the Daily Mirror like Latimer.

Poor Boud I do wonder. Fleet St says she has been put on a farm for Czech women – we have written to the Duchess of Aosta to find out what has really happened to her & if she is awfully miserable she could perhaps go to Italy. Probably she is on top of the world though.

Susan Hitler’s secret. Well if he wipes us all out with it PROMISE you’ll take a dose over there in revenge. I absolutely trust you to.

Do write & tell the American form. I imagine they just don’t want to think about the war like us & the Abyssinians & heavens I don’t blame them.

RSVP

Love from NR

Dear Miss

I see you have learnt to write in a single night.

Really, the Fem! She always thinks anybody who isn’t a hidebound Tory is a communist – if she knew the trouble I have with the C[ommunist] P[arty], & that the Labour Party have always hated them worse than anything – but these little niceties seem to have escaped her! Actually, I have always said that there wasn’t a pin to put between Bolshies & Nazis except that the latter, being better organized, are probably more dangerous. It’s the Fem herself who was always writing articles trying to point out the (invisible) differences.

Rodd has got his commission & goes off on Friday & we are having a GRAND BALL on Thursday, white ties & ball dresses & dinner for 30 people at Blomfield. Ambitious?

Write again soon. I wish I was on the Island. I too have been digging up my lawn, oh the hard work. I am going to keep recs.¹ I had a very grumbly letter from Woman.

Love from NR

Darling Steake¹

I wonder so much how you are both getting on now & if you like your new jobs. Do write & tell me all about your holiday & where you went.

Our flying journey home was wonderful but it was rather frightening when we took off.² The plane seemed far too small to battle all across the Atlantic. We came down at Botwood in Newfoundland & were able to go for a walk while the plane was being filled with petrol. The next stop was at Foynes in Ireland. The whole journey only took 28 hours! Derek had a special job for three weeks on research for the Air Ministry & now expects to go off again soon for a similar job. Muv, Farve & Debo are all still up at the Island & say it is lovely there. Uncle George, Aunt Madeleine & their two children³ are going to stay up there for two weeks with them. Nancy is working at a casualty depot & has of course had nothing to do. I heard from her a few days ago & she said she had been given an indelible pencil to write on the foreheads of her dead & dying & what would she do if a black man was brought in!!! So Nancy-like.

We had a refugee family in one of our cottages but they left at the end of the week because they found it too far from the public house. We are more or less full here: Tello & her granddaughter⁴ were here for three weeks but have now left. We have a friend’s baby with his nurse, & they come (the parents) every weekend. So far food has not been rationed but it is going to be. And we may only have ¾ the amount of coal. Petrol is very severely rationed & we only get fifteen gallons a month for the two cars. As I have to fetch nearly all the food from Banbury because the shops also have very little petrol the fifteen gallons will not last very long.

We can never get into Banbury for the cinema these days partly on account of the shortage of petrol & partly because it is so horrid driving in a blackout. We went to London for a night last week & saw the barrage balloons⁵ for the first time. They are so very beautiful & make a wonderful decoration.

I am sorry to have been so long before writing but I have been so terribly busy the last five weeks that I have not had a moment to spare for writing. One of the most difficult things has been blacking out this house. We have had to make black curtains for all the windows. Even if a pin prick of light shows through the police come rushing down on you!

There is no more family news at the moment but I will write again soon & I do long to hear from you.

Much love to you both from Woman

Darling Boud,

Your Boud is so sorry you are ill, I’ve written to you very often but I think the letters may have gone astray. I’ve been so longing for news of you & am awfully glad you are back home again with Blor & everyone to take care of you.

Esmond & I have got jobs in a Miami bar, you must admit rather ‘fascinating’. The other people there are heaven (mostly Italian & Spanish) & we have all our food there which is wonderful, because it’s the most delicious food I’ve e’er noted. We’ve got to know the most amazing people here; for instance, I have one friend whose only interest in life is birth control, & when I go to tea with her she takes me round in her car for free handouts of contraception to nigger families. Miami’s rather like the South of France or Venice, all the people here have got something extraorder about them. Well Boud I’ll write again soon, & do get well quickly.

Very Best Love, Yr Boud

Darling Boud

When I got your letter, I nearly went off my head! You SEE, I had ached for your, because I do love you so much.

Oh, Boud, I have a Goat! The Fem gave her to me & I LOVE her.

Oh Boud, I AM so sorry to be short, but will write again soon!

Dearest Cheerless

Well dear, I’m here for the weekend and although it’s very comfortable, it’s pretty bloody in some ways because Woman will keep telling one to keep one’s dogs off the daffodils etc & one feels that if one settles down with one’s book someone will say something & interrupt one.

Birdie is here & is so terribly pathetic, it really makes one miserable to see her. I can hardly bear the idea of this summer because she & Muv & I will be all boxed up at Swinbrook together & when Muv gets gloomy it’s awful. Actually she is wonderful, I believe I would have gone mad if I had been with poor Bird all this time. She is like a completely different person, it is extraordinary & awfully horrifying. She has stages of doing things, really like a child, I mean she has now got a habit of standing up till everyone in the room has sat down, & is furious if anyone starts eating before the Fem has started. The whole thing is really so awful it doesn’t bear thinking of. I wish you could see her, I long to know what you would think. She is very apologetic & funny in that way, always says ‘I’m awfully sorry’ before she says anything else.

[Incomplete]

Darling Diana

So pleased to hear of another 10lb son (Maximilian¹ this time I suppose). I hope it wasn’t too much trouble in spite of the size.

I stayed with Sachie & Georgia² last weekend & S told me such a typical Sitwell story – it seems that ages ago they had to stay two people who knew you & Bryan very well & one who had never met you & for some reason the only topic the whole weekend was you & B. By Sunday night the man who didn’t know you was joining in & saying no that was the weekend Bryan & Diana went to Bailiffscourt, it was the one after they rode over to see Lytton Strachey,³ because by then he knew you so intimately. Of course Sachie couldn’t remember who any of them were. Weston is heaven, have you seen it?

I am here chaperoning Debo & Andrew you must say good-natured of me. They are so funny, rush at the papers & turn quickly to the racing news. The Germans will have to march down the village street before they notice anything.

Cecil⁴ was also there, he now does 0 but photograph Cab ministers wouldn’t you love to see him at it.

Much love & to the beautiful BOY. NR

Darling Nardy

I am so pleased that you feel really well this time, it must make the whole difference of course. Are you feeding him for a few months? And what is his name?

I am in an anxious state as Derek is determined to join the Air Force if he can, as a gunner! But of course he must do what he thinks most useful, although it is heaven having him safe in Oxford.

Hoping to see you soon – in haste to catch the last 1½d post!

Much love to you all from Woman

Dearest Cheerless

I did adore getting your letter, I forget whether I got it before I wrote last.

You do sound to be having a lucky time. It’s all right here at least more or less. I have been here a month now without going away which is terrific for me. I have got very what Stiegson¹ would call ‘keen on the garden’ isn’t it extraorder, in fact I’m going to lunch with Aunt Sport [Dorothy] tomorrow to get more plants, would you believe it.

Muv & Bobo are getting awfully on my nerves, I must go away soon I think. There was a dreadful row at breakfast this morning & I swore at Muv in front of Mrs Timms² & Farve shook me like he did you after you’d been to Mrs Rattenbury’s trial.³

I think Bobo is a bit better but I don’t know. All outsiders think she is, but she certainly is very odd. Things like this happen – Colonel Buxton came here this morning & she dashed at him thinking he was the Dean & he looked rather surprised when she kissed him. Today we went to tea at Ditchley with the Trees⁴ & the Duff Coopers⁵ were staying there & for one ghastly moment I thought she wasn’t going to shake hands however she just did.

Lots of my friends are in France & some in Norway so I don’t think it sounds much fun in London. How that will make you roar. I always think while I’m writing how terrifically you despise my life.

It is such a pity we can’t go to the Island, I think Muv & Bobo would like it better.

I expect you know that Honks produced another ten pound boy the other day, she really does make a habit of it. She & the Leader really do get on well, a terrific tease on everyone.

Well dear I can’t think of anything else, do write. Goodness I do sometimes wish you were around here, you can’t think what a difference it would make when lividry is the note with the others.

Love from Yr Hen.

Get on.

What with one thing or another I’ve come here. Bobo has become quite impossible, she gets absolutely furious whatever I do & Muv is fed up so I left, just when the STOCKS I GREW FROM SEED (tease on you because you always said they never would) were beginning to flower.

I got here on Saturday after a terrifically easy journey¹ on account of going 1st class which I’d never been before & now I would rather not go than go 3rd. My dear ones² slept on my bed all night & none made a murmur. The train doesn’t stop during air raids so it’s never very late.

There is masses to do here, the kitchen garden is a mass of weeds & all where the field was ploughed for oats & potatoes needs hoeing & things & there is no servant here at all so I have to make my bed & cook. Luckily Peter³ washes up so it’s not too bad. We have our meals in the kitchen at the same time, but at a different table, as the men, so that puts a bar on any conversation but as Farve only says ‘what’ it doesn’t make much difference. The first morning I came down to breakfast about 10 & found the kitchen full of stale smoke (Farve had been smoking there since 6) & him peeling onions to put in a vile looking stew. However I’ve put a stop to all that because I won’t eat my breakfast in a sort of 3rd class smoking carriage.

The new boat is a dream. We are going to Salen⁴ to try & buy a goat this afternoon, I don’t much take to tinned milk.

Do write. I rang you up in London but of course you weren’t there.

Far the most awful thing ever happened at Swinbrook last week. Nina had been on heat & I thought all was o’er & let her out & it was a Saturday night & the inn was full of air force gentlemen & when I went out what should I see on the road in front of everyone but my dear ones stuck together for life but standing back to back & everyone pointing & roaring. I didn’t dare tell Muv because I knew she’d be so livid so I had to get the car & Studley had to get in backwards. They stayed together for about ½ an hour. So of course she’ll pig, isn’t it awful.

How is Milly & where is Abbey.⁵

Isn’t it awful about Honks,⁶ & isn’t it wonderful about Tim.⁷

I wonder what you would think of Birdie now, she really is impossible to live with because she flies into these fearful rages & it really is terrifying.

I wish you would come here, why don’t you?

WRITE.

Love from Dahlia

Darling Pam

I read your letter over and over again – thank you so much for it and for being so angelic about having the babies¹ and for taking Jonathan out and for sending me Bromo and pillow and towels. I do hope Alexander will soon get less screamy, I think it is a phase they all go through. I wonder if he enjoyed the drive to Rignell, I expect he did. How splendid that Max has done well on his new food; I miss him terribly sometimes and would give anything to hear him say ‘Agee’, and Alexander doing what Kit calls his morning broadcast. I do hope that Bryan will let Desmond and Miss G² go to you – I don’t think Biddesden suits him at present. If possible I want his tonsils out – if Sir Frederic still advises it, which I am sure he will.

If you or Nanny or Muv writes ‘the’ letter³ to me do enclose letters from the boys, I am allowed to have them in the same envelope. I had a letter from Kit yesterday, he is quite cheerful. It is such hell not being able to see him.

Could you write to Miss Gillies and give her my love and explain that I am not allowed to write more than one letter (one goes to Kit of course) and ask her to tell you just how Desmond is getting on so that you or Muv can tell me. I am asking the Governor’s permission to see Desmond and if he says yes I will put his name on the visiting pass which I will send to Muv. If he can’t come of course it doesn’t matter but I will write his name in case he can. Please tell Muv not to bother to come all the way to see me if it is a trouble; I adore having a visitor but I feel it is such a business for her. I am perfectly well again. If anyone comes I would love a few country flowers; also a Woolworth cup & saucer, & a bowl or dish (for salad or anything I may cook). No food is allowed to be brought or sent, although we may order once a fortnight. When the hols start I will put Jonathan’s name on the pass. If Desmond & Miss Gillies come, it would be better if no one else came as we only have 15 mins. Do write again, or Nanny, and put everything about the babies, no detail is too insignificant, I so long to hear all about them. Give them and Nanny all my love, & Horse⁴ if you see him.

Max Mosley, Desmond and Jonathan Guinness, Alexander Mosley, 1940. Diana kept this photograph of her four sons with her while she was in prison.

All love darling from Nardy

Darling Honks

Muv writes saying one can write to you at last, oh I do so long to see your cell. I haven’t seen you or your pigs for such ages that I’ve almost forgotten what you look like what with one thing and another.

I’ve been here for three weeks with Farve & it’s terribly gloomy because it never stops raining so the result is that Lilah McCalmont¹ who has come to stay, & I never stop cooking for one minute, we stiffly whip all day. I have made a wonderful improvement on Béarnaise by putting equal amounts of wine, lemon juice & vinegar. I hear you cook like a mad thing too, I do hope you are given eatable ingredients. As for poor Sir O, is he allowed to? I suppose not, horrors, what would Pat² say.

I suppose it isn’t any good me coming to see you because you can see your pigs nearly always can’t you, or anyhow old women who can tell you about them.

We’re coming back next week & I suppose I shall have to work in London, I can’t live at Swinbrook it’s too tricky, so if ever you were short of a visitor I would come hurrying to Holloway, hurrying to Hollo-way.

I can’t think of anything fascinating, nothing much occurs here. Farve is either in fits of gloom or terrific spirits, apparently for no reason. I hope he won’t live here alone in the winter because gloom is usually the form & what it must be like here then I can’t imagine. Lividry sets in when my goat eats his creepers etc exactly like it always did, he is an eccentric old fellow.

When we were climbing around the caves here the other day I heard the most terrifying sound just like a hermit tearing calico, it so horrified me that we haven’t been round there since. It has become the stock joke & thing to be frightened of, oh the horror.

I wonder what Muv’s form is now, I mean whether she’s in a good temper or not. Her favourite thing is going to see you, she always writes ‘I’m going to see D’, or ‘I’ve just been to see D’ usually from the tea room at Paddington. She will be the death of me.

Much love. I would adore to come & see you if

you thought it a good idea from Debo

Darling Pam

I am asking permission to send you this letter instead of the visit – I did not send a pass because there have been so many air raid warnings and I thought it would be so awful if you came all the way here and then there was a warning and you could not see me after all. I am sending you a pass in this letter; but please don’t come unless you more or less must come to London – don’t come on my account because I know it must be such a trouble. Will you thank Muv millions of times for her visit and for bringing Jonathan with her, I did love seeing him, it has made such a difference. How I wish Desmond could come, but I suppose he is not strong enough yet.¹ Please thank Nanny for her sweet letter; Kit always asks all details about Stodge and Weedom² and we both long to see them, do ask her to write again soon, and do tell Miss Gillies she can write to me now (’tho I can’t reply) about Desmond. Will you ask Muv to send £1 to Desmond from me for his birthday; I am also getting Harrods to send him a few little things.

Now darling I wonder if you can possibly imagine how grateful I am to you for all you are doing for the babies, I feel so overwhelmed by all your wonderful kindness. I do long to see you all so much, and the sweet little foals. The vegetables from last week are still lasting, they are heaven. I made saucisses au vin blanc today for tea. Do send some more lovely DILL, Enid³ & I adore it. I am very well, only wish we were out more in this divine weather, we are only let out 8.30–9.30 and 6.30–7.30 – early and late. Heavens what a lot there will be to tell when I get out – there is very little one can put in a letter. It is rather cold and chilly in the prison and one longs for more sun. Tell Nanny to get any clothes she needs for Alexander and Max before the purchase tax is imposed. Also, if she sends me wool and pattern, I would knit anything – for instance, knickers to go over Max’s nappies (!) Have you seen the dress I knitted for myself? Would you like me to make you one? Do write soon – every detail enchants me.

All love darling & so many thanks from Nard

Kisses to Alexander & Max.

Darling Nardy

I hope no bombs have dropped on the Prison yet. Max & Alexander are very well, except that Max has rather taken to not sleeping much in the day time. Nanny thinks he may be getting some teeth. He is now having milk from an Ayrshire herd in the village which is not only T[uberculin] T[ested] but also Attested which is the very best that it could be. The other day I was out blackberry-ing with Alexander in his push chair & the most peculiar looking Aircraft came over which looked just like a huge toy one, it was so old fashioned. It was very low & at first I thought I saw figures standing between the double wings & holding on to the wires in readiness to jump off. When it arrived closer I could see that there were no figures & that it was English. It made a wonderful Nanny tease & I told her that I put Alexander well out in the open so that he could be plainly seen in his white coat & that I rushed into the hedge & hid! Nanny has to be teased a good deal, she enjoys it. Of course the darling dogs are a very good teasing subject, she thinks I take far too much notice of them & not nearly enough of her babies. She always comes into the library with me after dinner to hear the news & do some knitting. Alexander is to have a scarlet woolly coat made. His blue one looks lovely & I do hope you are not too cold; we can send you some warmer things if you want them.

In haste to get to Banbury & catch the post.

Love from Woman

Darling Honks

We are going to Woman’s next week, my wonderful plan of Birdie going away for two weeks has fallen sadly through because Muv & I have got to go instead. It is awful because she so hates me that life here has become almost impossible. The sitting room is so small & two enormous tables in it belong exclusively to her & if one so much as puts some knitting down on one for a moment chaos reigns because she hies up & shrieks ‘bloody fool’ very loud. I think in some ways she’s better though but she seems to have completely lost her sense of humour & never roars at the funniest thing.

Muv seems always to be in rather a way about me, doing things she doesn’t allow, really I should have thought what with one thing & another there isn’t much point in being seen to as though one was three.

Isn’t it killing about the Jews in Rutland Gate.¹

Farve has gone to Southend & taken Margaret the-maid-who-has-a-young-man-who-took-her-to-Ascot-in-a-Rolls-Royce.² I expect he will have a gay time.

I had lunch with the Wid the other day. She was alone because the Baileys had gone to lunch with the Dulvertons who hadn’t asked the Wid – none of the neighbours do! Mrs McCalmont told me she was very surprised when shopping one morning in Stow she saw an Egyptian figure approach dressed in a cape & turban & said ‘Tell me, what do you think of Dakar?’³ The Baileys have got printed notices all over their house to say ‘There is no gloom in this house’. And the Wid is living there!

I must go & milk my good goat.

Much love from Debo

Dear Cheerless

Well dear I am sorry I haven’t written but I thought my old hen would be bored with long accounts of aching around with everyone you don’t know & you know how you despise my life anyhow.

I spend most of my life in taxis going to & from Sandhurst because Andrew is there learning to be an officer which takes 5 months of appalling hard work & never a night off which you must say is a long time. Philip Toynbee¹ is there too & they all like him & are suitably amazed by his filthy habits.

We are going to Woman’s tomorrow which is a great move for me because wherever I go I have to take two dogs, my goat & my pony & cart.

It is wonderful of Esmond to have joined the airforce I do think.

If you ever come across the Kennedys (the ambassador here) do take note of Kick,² she is a dear girl, I’m sure you’d like her. (Though of course you’d despise her like you do me.)

Well dear, do write.

Best love from Henderson

Darling Bobo

I am using a letter this week to write to Nanny and you, she will send it on to you. I wish I could do it more often, but it is not possible.

How are you darling; I always get your messages from Muv, how I wish I could see you. Perhaps before very long I shall be let free, wouldn’t that be Paradise. If not quite free, what we want more than anything is for Kit and me to be imprisoned together. Please get anyone who sees MPs and so on to press for this. It has never even been suggested that any charge could be brought against either of us or that we have ever done anything illegal.

You can’t imagine what a joy Muv’s visits are to me, please do tell her so. I only wish I could write to her as well, but as I see her I thought she would understand. She brings me such lovely things and does such boring boredoms for me. I am quite clean and comfortable again as we now have hot water to wash in and gas to cook on again.

Isn’t it horrible about Jonathan having an appendix operation – I do hope they will let me out to go & see him. Do write to Desmond if you have time, because when Nanny cuts this part of the letter off all the ends of the words will be teased – however the point of this letter is to say how much I think of you and long to see you. Do write to Tom and thank him so much for going all the way to Brixton, I wish it had not been umsonst [in vain]. It was divine of him.

Do ask Muv to visit Kit the week after next, he would so love it. It was HEAVEN seeing him the other day at the Law Courts.¹

All love darling from Nard XXXXXXX

My darling Boud:

We have just been told that we may write one extra letter (for Christmas) so of course I shall use mine for you. You can imagine how much I shall be thinking of you all at Christmas; it will be simply hateful being in jail for it but never mind, next year perhaps everything will be wonderful again. Darling I do hope you are feeling really better; my Christian Scientist friend always asks so much about you, and she spends her entire life praying for people (you know how they do) and dozens of prayers are for you. Aren’t you pleased? Tell Muv, the butter she brought will last ages and it is literally the joy of my life, and do thank her for the eggs and the lovely delicious brioche. Kit writes to say that he hopes they may soon give us better prison conditions, and imprison us together. If we had each other it would make all the difference of course, and if Muv could ask Choiney¹ to press for that it would be an immense help.

I do so love the green scarf you made me and I often wear it on my head and look like a mad Turkish lady. I haven’t opened your Xmas pres yet, I am keeping it for the day, of course I won’t be able to write and thank, but I am thrilled about it. Please will you send a message to Nanny, not to hoard food² (for the babies). I don’t suppose she would but Kit suddenly had a nightmare that she might. Send her and Blor, and everyone and the babies all my love, and Debo, and specially Muv and you. I do hope the boys will spend some of the hols with you, please spoil them from me, and make them eat a lot and get fatter. I get so homesick at times, but perhaps it won’t be much longer now. Tell Muv to get Hansard of December 10th, all about us;³ if she can’t I will send you mine. I am reading Die Jungfrau von Orleans (Schiller) it is so beautiful. If you want a heavenly novel get Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften.⁴ I adored it, and so did Kit. Well goodbye darling, I wish I could write to you more often, but there it is. I think of you every day.

All Christmas love darling from Nardyxxxxxxxxx

P.S. Tell Muv if she gets what looks like a letter from me it will only be dull old rent bill to pay! Wish I cd write to her.

Darling Nard,

Oh, Nard, I WAS surprised to get your lovely letter – I never thought you COULD write!! Oh Nard, I do so HOPE you had a lovely and beautiful Christmas, I prayed about it a terrific lot. Nard, I am going to be confirmed. Of course, I shall be a Christian Scientist, but my wonderful Christian Science lady, Miss Taylor, says I must if it helps me, and it DOES help me, a terrific lot.

Oh Nard, thank you SO much for your lovely pound, I liked it best of all my presents.

Nard, I am in the Choir!! In the church, of course. Aren’t I lucky!!!! I’m afraid all this sounds nonsense to you, only you see how I am SO bored here.

Well, Nard, I am afraid I must stop, you don’t know how slowly I do write!! So goodbye, Nard.

Best love, Nard, from Bobo

Darling Diana

I had no idea I was allowed to write – as I now hasten to do – & thank you for your kind present. I have bought myself some much needed facial condiments with it & am most grateful – actually managed to find a Guerlain lipstick in an obscure chemist’s shop which must have given me the same sensation a bibliophile would have on coming across a 1st folio of Shakespeare.

I sent the Wid a box of soap called Modestes Violettes & she wrote back ‘Coming downstairs in a rather specially sad mood …’

No wonder she is rather specially sad, freezing at Maugersbury & Aunt W[eenie] won’t pick the war over with her – ‘I said I hear that Holland House has quite gone & she said come on let’s have luncheon, much more interesting.’ Can’t you see it.

I saw your little Alexander the other day he is a darling how I wish they were living with me – I had almost forgotten what heaven Nanny is.

Much love from Nance

Darling Nardy

Both Alexander & Max are extra well. Apparently Alexander was heard calling this last night when he was meant to be going to sleep ‘Trade, Trude, dogs, dogs, dogs!’ & as far as he could he was copying my voice. Isn’t it extra tüm [sweet]? I do wish you could have them, I always feel so awful when I can see as much as I like of them & you are unable to do so. I may seem not to understand how awful it is for you when I am actually talking to you but that is only because we have to get through so much in such a horribly short space of time. I must tell you that I spend hours at night sometimes worrying about it & I always feel so gloomy when the visit is over & there is still so much we have not been able to discuss. I only pray it may now only be for a short while longer.

I saw Nancy yesterday. She is going to leave Rutland Gate & hopes to get a little house at Wimbledon so as to be with Peter. Derek is still in Scotland but I much hope will be down here again in about two weeks’ time. Muv & Bobo arrive to stay today & I will tell them news of you.

Much love & to Kit from Woman

Darling Honks

It is so exciting because Andrew & I are going to be married, such a tease on Bridget [Airlie] who always said we never would. His parents have been so wonderful about it, I didn’t know people could be so nice, they really seem pleased. It would be awful getting married if everyone hated it, but as it is it’s perfect. It was only arranged between us for two days before the papers started telephoning, they really are like magic. We went to get a ring, it was such fun & I was terrified someone we knew would come in & see us at it because no-one was meant to know till it was in The Times. The awful thing is that when a soldier gets married he has to tell his Colonel & of course Andrew hadn’t when it was in the paper so I hope lividry hasn’t set in.

I expect we shall be terrifically poor but think how nice it will be to have as many dear dogs & things as one likes without anyone to say they must get off the furniture. I do so wish you weren’t in prison, it will be sad not having you to go shopping with, only we’re so poor I shan’t have much of a trousseau on account of everything being so expensive.

Poor Andrew is hating every moment of it & keeps saying how embarrassing it all is & how he wishes he could go away. He’s at Elstree for this week, learning something, which is a great tease because we wanted to go out the night it’s announced but as it seems to be in all the papers already it doesn’t seem much point.

I am so excited for it. We haven’t decided on a church, all the nice ones have been bombed. Anyhow it isn’t for nearly two months so there isn’t any hurry. Your nanny was killing & said ‘You’ll be wanting all our baby clothes’. I can’t get over how wonderful the Devonshires were, they never said anything against, not even how young he is, because he’s only just had his twenty-first birthday, I do think it was nice of them.

I don’t know where we shall live or anything, it all depends on where he is sent, I should think some boarding house or something.

Much love, Debo

Darling Honks

Thank you so much for your heavenly letter, it was bliss of you to write. You can’t think how exciting it all is. The only tease is you not being out, you are the only person who is taking proper interest. I keep on at Muv about the dress etc. & she only looks at the ceiling and says, ‘Ohrrr, I think we want some new paint’. I will show you my ring which everyone except me & Mrs Bunce¹ thinks very mivvy [stingy]. Nancy was rather teasy about it & said, ‘You can’t go to Cartier, it’s well known to be hopeless’, when we’d already been. However I like it & I hope you will.

Nancy is going to ask Cecil Beaton where to have my dress made by a theatrical person because it wouldn’t be so expensive as a proper shop. It’s going to be masses & masses & masses of white tulle, tight bodice & sleeves, a skirt such as has never been seen before for size. I don’t mind if that is the fashion or not, it’s what suits me. And the train will come out of the skirt & be enormous with great ruches of tulle all down, otherwise the skirt will be quite plain. What to wear on my head I don’t know & I know Miss Stevens will wreck my hair but I couldn’t go to anyone else. Then if the actual wedding dress doesn’t cost too much we could go a bit of a bust on the going away one, have it from Worth or Molyneux or somewhere. Oh Honks, it is so exciting. I’m going to begin on my underclothes next week. Lady Dashwood said I could choose something at Lydia Moss & put it down to her account, so that will be heaven. If you are really going to give me something, I would adore a little jewel – I’m sure I won’t get any. Only you’re not to spend too much because it is the war & all.

Andrew is away on a course this week so I haven’t seen him for ages but shall on Sunday & I expect we’ll fix when to get married then. It will be about the middle or end of next month I expect. The thing is, which church? Some say St Maggots [Margaret’s], some say the Smithfield one & I rather think St Martin’s-in-the-Fields but I must go & study-dear this week. If only one knew how many people would come, I do hope masses. As for the reception, the Wid has kindly offered Tite St but I’m secretly hoping the Salisburys will say Arlington St, but Muv says I’m not to say that in case they don’t. I had twenty-four letters & telegrams yesterday, wasn’t it wonderful. On top of all this, Nina is going to have puppies next week, isn’t it a worry.

I roared about the ‘cris de joie’, when I cook there is nothing but groans. Poor Andrew doesn’t know what he’s in for. I wish I knew how much dough we shall have, not much I suppose on account of the war. The Wid was wonderful & wants to be a bridesmaid draped in black. She said, ‘Tell me dear, will you be IMMENSELY rich?’

I’m coming to London in my £14 car tomorrow, it does go so well, you can’t imagine. I’m only having £200 for my trousseau, but I suppose it will buy the essential though certainly not linen. Everything is so terribly expensive but I hope I shall be able to get something nice.

Well Honks I do long to see you & tell you all though Muv says it’s terribly dull for other people, isn’t it vile of her. All Farve said when I told him was something about the insurance of my car. He is hopeless.

All love, Debo

Darling Nard

Well, Nard, about the Wedding!!!! Well, it was quite heaven. Debo’s dress was quite too lovely, and she looked MARVELLOUS. The only person who looked ghastly was dear old Farve; he looked so sad. He was wearing his Home Guard Uniform (‘Rompers’) which was also rather depressing as it wasn’t even long enough. Horrors!!

12 May Well, Nard, I am continuing this letter, I didn’t finish it before because of my poor paralysed hand. Nard, I want to tell you something important. Nard, I am not allowed to visit you. You know, I am sure, how much I would love to come & see poor you. But it’s not possible.

I see the Germans have bombed the House of Commons – how awful.

Nard, I must tell you about my sorrow. Five of my very best English friends, and one foreign one, have died in the last year. How can I bear it?

The Fem sends you her love.

V best love, Nard, from Bobo

Mary Ormsby-Gore, Unity and Pamela at Deborah’s wedding. London, 19 April 1941.

Darling Boud

I am so sorry, Boud, not have written about the Babe,¹ but the fact is, I write so slowly still. Never mind, I write faster now than I did earlier. You know, I think, why I was ill; so I can explain it to you. You know I got shot in the head. Well, that paralysed my right arm & right leg. Understand?

Well, Boud, I was so thrilled by your cablegram – or, was it really yours? – I telephoned the Fem immediately, and, do you know, Boud, I heard her crying with complete joy!!!! As for darling Blorwell – well. Boud, what are you going to call her? Do write & say.

Boud, I must tell you something fearfully sad. Dolly Wilde has died. Oh, Boud, I know you will be unhappy. I was, fearfully unhappy.

Peter Rodd is going off to Africa. Poor, poor Nancy.

Well, Boud, I will stop, as I can’t write Fast!!

Give your baby a kiss from Aunt Me!!

V. Best Love, Boud

Darling Decca

I wonder how you & your baby are getting on now, also Esmond. I hear you have been in Canada to see him. Do you think he will come over here soon or is he to remain in Canada? I do wish we could see you all again, it seems such ages since we were in New York for the World Fair.

Derek is now operational flying & has been for about eight weeks. He has just been home for six days leave which he badly needed as going up most nights is very exhausting. The Air Force blue suits him so well & I expect it suits Esmond also with his blue eyes. What is your baby like & what are you naming her? Do send me a photograph of her if you have one. Diana’s two children are here still, it will be a year at the end of this month since they arrived. Nanny is kept very busy looking after them both, we cannot get a nursery maid to help, they have all gone into munitions. Also it is impossible to get housemaids & parlour maids so we now only have a cook & a little girl who seems to do everything. We are now rationed for clothes as I expect you have seen. A mackintosh takes fourteen coupons! The total number of coupons is sixty-six a year. Luckily for me I still have plenty of summer clothes from last year & so will not have to use any coupons just yet.

We see quite a lot of Bobo. She & Muv often come over & stay here for a few nights. Also darling Blor often comes here, she showed me a photograph of you & your baby.

On account of the difficulty of getting food for cattle I am having to give up my herd of Aberdeen Angus. It is very sad because I had bred some really beautiful ones. However they will make good beef. The Bull, Black Hussar, has already been sent to the butcher. Poor Black Hussar!

Please give Esmond my love when you next see him.

Much love from Woman

¹

Dear Cheer

Well dear, I’ve smacked my ovary and taken it to Madame Bovary and the result is I’m in pig, I shan’t be like my old Hen and not tell anyone because although it’s not going to be born for nigh on a year I have to tell people on account of being sick and feeling so awful.

Well dear, do write an account of exactly what you felt like and exactly how embarrassed you were when you went to see the dr because I really nearly died when he pulled at the budding bust and said I must get a point on it whatever that may mean. I am glad to see in the papers that pregnant ladies are going to have some more clothes coupons otherwise think how awful it would be with everything splitting when one got huge. Think of a name for it there’s a good old Hen, I do hope it’s a girl. It ought to be exactly a year younger than your one, it’s supposed to be born on the 10th of Feb.

The idea of Andrew being a dad is so killing that I think of nought else. I hardly ever see him because he is always in some remote place and country hotels are so full now that you usually can’t get a room. He is going to be near Biddesden soon so I shall ask myself there. I have been here for three weeks and it’s been lovely and hot and there are masses of strawberries but even they taste disgusting, did things used to taste disgusting with you?

Cheer yourself along and write to yr old Hen if you can be bothered. I do long to hear what you’re up to.

Birdie hates me so dreadfully, I really can’t think why, it makes it almost impossible to go to Swinbrook. You can’t think how awful it is to see her now because although one is quite used to it because she’s been like that for nearly two years now it’s simply awful when one suddenly remembers what she used to be like. I don’t believe she will ever get quite normal again, it really is a nightmare when one thinks of her future. She has got a terrific religious thing on now and if you say even ‘damn’ she gets quite furious and says it [is] wicked to swear.

I was among the girls being called up to work at some horrid job for 48 hours a week but now I’m in pig I don’t have to do it and you know how I hate work so it’s very lucky.

Well dear do cheer and write to me. Swinbrook is the best address.

Love from Yr Hen

Darling Honks

It is awful of me not to have written to you before for your birthday, anyhow I do hope you had a nice one, I hear your pigs went up to see you. I saw in the paper that you had arrived in the Isle of Man with 50 suitcases and you had to carry them all yourself!¹ I did so roar. I went to see Mr Gilliat² on account of being in pig and I’ve never been so embarrassed as I was by the things he did, it really was torture, how did you manage it? And how did you manage to have four pigs, were you very sick with all of them because it really does poison life, I go about with my hand over my mouth.

It’s heaven here in many ways, people are allowed to bathe in the sea at one place and I’ve been several times as the doc seems to think it O.K.

The trouble about married life is never seeing one’s husband. He is going on a course for all July to Netheravon. How I wish you were still at Biddesden. I’ve written to Woman to ask if she thinks one could possibly ask oneself there for a weekend or two because she used to go when Derek was near them. Otherwise I shan’t see him for weeks and weeks and it was such a waste having the Regent’s Park house done up because so far I’ve spent exactly one night in it! Eddie Marsh³ lives here now, he is such a silly old man and eats a terrible lot. His best friend is Ivor Novello⁴ who is acting in Brighton and has just been over here for the day. The children⁵ got giggles at lunch when he said something was ‘divine’ for the 10th time, it was awful. I’m going to Swinbrook for July, I do hope Bird won’t kill me, she does hate me so!

My good goat is giving ten pints of milk a day and Muv has been making cheeses, you must say it’s good. That wonderful ring you gave me is the admiration of everybody, it makes my engagement ring look perfectly stupid.

Did I tell you about when Jonathan and Desmond came over to lunch about a month ago and I said ‘Do go & see Pam Timms’⁶ & Desmond went bright red & said he didn’t want to and Jonathan said ‘she’s like an old toy you’ve no more use for and have thrown away’. Tom was there, I never saw anyone roar so much.

Much love from Debo

Darling Sue

Many thanks for a long & most interesting letter dated 20 May. Oh dear I do wish I could see you & (such a charming name) Constancia she sounds such heaven.

Boud. Well I promise that I am quite confident about her now. When I first saw her I had to go away & cry for hours because I felt sure she would be mad, but now, although quite dotty as she always was, she is heaven to be with & a happy person again. Muv has been too wonderful with her & absolutely given up her whole life – Farve simply beastly, hardly goes near her & has never been there to relieve Muv & give her a change to have a little holiday. Poor TP, one keeps off the war with her but she is, I fear, very unsound at heart. But she never mentions it.

About sending things, one mayn’t ask, you know, but really we have everything so don’t bother. Food is plentiful although rather dull. I have yet to feel in the least hungry or to have a craving for anything special.

Rodd has gone, I can’t say where, which is very dull for me & goodness knows when one will see him again.

I have a simply splendid maid called Gladys,¹ she has been with me now a year. She really enjoys the raids & is awfully funny about everything, she is the greatest comfort in my life.

I go to work now all day, a paid job thank goodness. I find country holidays for A[ir] R[aid] P[recautions] workers – it is jolly nice as they come back saying how the wife & I couldn’t have been better treated if we had been the King & Queen. They are such heaven.

The other people in the office seem to think I’m a sort of joke (Susan how queer) & when there’s a quiet moment do imitations of me on the telephone.

Robert [Byron] has been drowned I am very miserable about it.

I must go to sleep – will write again soon.

Much love, Susan

Darling Nard –

Well, I can hardly tell you my news! I am being allowed to go & see – you! you! I’m SO happy & wonderfully contented! Oh, Nard! Oh, Nard!

With love from Bobo

Darling Soo

Did you get my letter thanking for the parcel, it was wonderful & now I know it took such hours I really feel grateful. Kind little miss.

I haven’t seen Boud for months, you see I WORK Susan also Sat mornings & then one is asked not to travel but if one does do so one has the drunken & licentious soldiery pressed to one’s bosom the whole way except for very occasional weekends.

I never note Rodd’s graph¹ at all & it is 5 months since he left & there is no leave & most people think the war will last another 5 years. So – you see. Also my dear old mother in law has stopped my allowance in order to build a ballroom in memory of my pa in law. I keep saying how I wish she were religious, a nice marble X would cost far less (tho less practical of course).

Well Soo write soon your last was very short.

Love from NR

Darling Honks

It was heaven of you to write your precious letter and all. You can’t think how much better I feel now, really quite alright.¹ The comfort of this place is unbelievable and blissful nurses. It is so odd I’d never even had a bedpan before. Oh Honks, never Gilliat again, I have completely lost confidence in him. He never turned up till ages after he was wanted and when I was lying there with everything over he came in and all the nurses said ‘Here’s a friend to see you’ and if I’d had the strength I really would have kicked him or at least asked him where he had been all the afternoon.² What was rather awful was that I’d had a temperature of 103 for four days beforehand so I really wasn’t feeling like an effort. However all one can say is that it can’t have been one quarter so bad for me as it was for Decca because I never knew the baby though it was so alive when it was born that I felt a sort of glimmer of hope though I knew it wasn’t any good. Muv was quite wonderful and Andrew stayed with me till it was nearly born, it was so wonderful to have him. He finishes his leave tomorrow which is terribly sad because he has been here such a lot this week. My duch³ and everyone have been absolutely wonderful.

Lady Carnarvon⁴ embraced Muv wasn’t it wonderful.

Poor Nancy sounds rather bad with her appendix and ovary.⁵ I wish she could come here. I think when you first get out of prison you ought to come here for ages, the difference would be so wonderful.

(Everything seems to be wonderful in this letter though it isn’t really.)

Anyhow it was heaven of you to write, I do so long to see you, it is such a tease.

I’m afraid they won’t let me get up for two more weeks which will seem rather long but perhaps be the best in the end.

Much love from Debo

[passed by prison censor 28/11/41]

Darling Diana

Thank you so much for the wonderful grapes, you are really an angel & grapes are so good for me. I have had a horrible time, so depressing because they had to take out both my tubes & therefore I can never now have a child. I can’t say I suffered great agony but quite enough discomfort – but darling when I think of you & the 18 stitches in your face¹ it is absolutely nothing.

The Rodds have been wonderfully true to form – my mother in law was told by the surgeon I shld be in danger for 3 days, & not one of them even rang up to enquire let alone sending a bloom or anything. I long to know if they bothered to look under R in the deaths column, very much doubt it however.

I never hear from Peter or he from me it is too depressing like the grave. Also he never gets his pay.

Muv was wonderful, she swam in a haze of bewilderment between me & Debo. When my symptoms were explained to her she said ‘ovaries – I thought one had 700 like caviar’. Then I said how I couldn’t bear the idea of a great scar on my tum to which she replied ‘But darling who’s ever going to see it?’

Poor Debo it must be wretched, the worst thing in the world I should think – except losing a manuscript of a book which I always think must be the worst.

Have you read Mémoires d’outre tombe² it is so wonderful. I’ve had a heavenly time reading my books in peace, such a change from rushing off to the office at 8.30.

I’ve left my address book at home so must send this to Muv.

Nigel [Birch] has just been to see me rather optimistic in mood which is entirely new for him, I nearly fell out of bed.

I spent the week end before I got ill (in considerable pain most of the time) with Roy & Billa [Harrod]. They have an ideal child called Hen[ry] – I think the prettiest, most amusing little boy I ever saw.

Oxford society is very pleasant I think, everybody so amiable & nice, most unlike what one would imagine such a small highly cultivated world to be. Gerald [Berners] has taken up his residence there. Apparently he has a mania for tea-shop life & Billa says it is a kind of task, undertaken in turns, to face Gerald across rather grubby check tablecloths at mealtimes.

Much love darling

& many more thanks for the grapes, Nancy

Darling Nard

Well, Nard About the 1st December. I could come then, again. May I come? Do say yes, do. Because, Nard, I do love visiting you, I do, really. And, you know now I am well again, I can’t bear life. I mean, this war!

You see, when I first came back, I thought all this was a play, and I was looking on. Now, I know I have a part to play, & I can’t bear acting it!

Next week am going to stay with Woman, which will be fun, I shall see Max! Oh, Nard, I love, adore Max!

V Best Love, Nard, from Bobo

¹

Darling Honks

I thought I would just write and say how completely better I am although you couldn’t possibly be interested. I came up here in the most glorious luxury with a nurse and I was wheeled in a chair across St Pancras to the train! I am still in bed but getting up tomorrow, I can’t face getting up today as I should be alone with that awful old Eddie M[arsh].

I was terrified that Gilliat would say I wasn’t to start another pig for two years but thank goodness he said six months rather grudgingly and even that depending on my kidney. I write long letters to Muv about my medicines and things but I’m sure she says ‘Orrhhn’ and doesn’t read them.

I do hope what I saw about Sir O in the paper is true, I was so excited for you, it will make a difference.²

It is so absolutely dreadful about Esmond isn’t it,³ I don’t know what to say to poor Squalor, I don’t even know how to begin the letter because I can’t start Dearest Cheerless like I usually do. Thank goodness she has got her pig anyhow. It is so much worse for her because of her being so queer one feels she would mind even more than most people.

I do die to see you again. I’m home till the beginning of January when we move into a new house at Stanmore. At least that’s what we mean to do but it all depends on getting a maid which seems literally impossible.

Andrew can’t get away for Xmas which is sad but he is coming up for one day next week. He was so wonderful when I was actually having the baby and stayed with me till the last moment.

Much love, Debo

Dearest Hen

I am so appalled by the news I heard from Muv that I simply don’t know what to say or even how to begin. It must be so absolutely dreadful for you waiting for news. I have sometimes tried to imagine what it would be like if anything happened to Andrew and I can almost guess what you must be going through. I am so hopeless at writing, but I have been thinking the whole time of you, and I do so long to see you, it seems such ages that I’ve almost forgotten what you look like and I do long to see Constancia.

This is a hopeless letter but I can’t make it any better because of being so hopeless at explaining what I mean.

Much love, Hen

Darling Nardy

Oh! How much I wish you could be with us here for Christmas. These two hankies are instead of a Christmas card – the boys each wanted to buy one for Bobo & actually four went to the coupon so I had these for you. I believe you actually have Kit with you now, how marvellous that it has happened in time for Christmas; it will at least make all the difference to you both. I am in a terrible haze because we will be a huge party with almost nothing to eat, at least that is how it seems now. I suppose it will be OK in the end. We will be eight in the dining room, Muv, Tom, Bobo, Captain & Mrs Fox, the boys & myself. The usual four in the nursery & three in the kitchen. I hope the one turkey will go round & leave something for Friday!!! Poor Derek had to go back yesterday. I can’t even go down & have Christmas lunch with him tomorrow because he will be ‘on’ today & tomorrow.

There is no more news but I will write again soon.

Much love & best wishes from Pam to you & Kit

Darling Diana

I’ve just seen your charming babies. I think Max is a peach. Alexander didn’t like me much I think. I was very disappointed but I suppose it would be all right if he got used to one. Max has terrific poise hasn’t he. It was heaven to see Nanny.

Henry Yorke would love to visit you. He said I was to ask, & not tell him if you would rather not. It would have to be this month as he is on leave from his fire fighting.

Bobo is being very reasonable. She was too naughty when she was with me. I took her out to luncheon in a place where by bad luck I happened to know two other people lunching & she put on a completely mad act, announcing to the room at large ‘I’m going to have my feet off, Nancy’ & really being too naughty. She did much the same with poor Gladys who nearly died of it! Here however she is much more normal, though inclined to be rather bad tempered.

Goodness the prettiness of the country after months of London also it is bliss to be out of that pitch-dark shop,¹ much as I like the work.

Much love from NR

Darling Diana

How could you be so wonderful it brings tears to the eyes. You can’t imagine the horror of the stocking situation in a book shop where one is forever on one’s knees & I spend my weekends darning. Anne Hill¹ wears black & white check wool ones but I somehow can’t –

Bobo enjoyed my party. She brought a ghastly old dress full of moth holes so I crammed her into my only good black one which we left undone all the way down the back & she kept on a coat so all was well but it was rather an awful moment when I saw what she did propose to wear. Then she refused to make up her face but the adored Capitaine Roy² took her upstairs & did it for her. So in the end she looked awfully pretty.

Cecil [Beaton] came into the shop ‘such an oasis’ & roared with laughter for an hour. The shop is really very gay now, full of people all day, & I am installed in the gas fire so manage to keep fairly warm.

Fancy favourite aunt how blissful. I can’t think why as I am completely tongue tied by children, even yours, & at a loss how to behave. I long for a niece, can’t you provide one.

It would be fun to see you with Dig & Henry [Yorke] as I hear you suggest though slight waste not to see you alone.

Goodness I feel old, going grey & bald & look terrible. I’ve been doing far too much & need a week in bed.

Much love, NR

Darling Honks

Your blissful Blor and Pig life arrived safely yesterday, it is utter bliss having them you can’t imagine how wonderful all the Blors are together, they talk about rations and girls and the weather and they are too wonderful about ‘helping’ as we’ve only got one servant in this vast house so it’s altogether glorious but if only you were here it would just be more glorious.

Max and Alexander are so terribly funny. The first thing they said was, ‘What is your neem?’ which was a wonderful start. They both told me not to talk at table. Max is in a permanent furious rage.

We eat all our meals in the kitchen, it’s so much easier and the food is hot, I hope they don’t mind. Max keeps saying, ‘This is a very odd nursery’, which of course it is.

Much love and to Sir O, Debo

Darling Honks

Thank you so much for your letter. I am so adoring the children, they are a roaring success wherever they go and no wonder. I hope they aren’t finding it too dull though.

Billy¹ has been on leave and came down to entertain them. They asked him to draw things for them like lions running which he found very difficult. They both drew very complicated systems of pipes with a so-called tap at the end. They are obviously going to be sanitary engineers. They went to tea at Churchdale yesterday and Max told the duke not to smoke at table. I wasn’t there as Andrew and I went to Belvoir for the weekend. I think they enjoyed it, my duch adored them and they didn’t get back till ¼ past 7. We went for a picnic to Chatsworth² in the pony cart which was great fun. We went into the strong room to see the gold plate but the children were only interested in the bars across the window.

All the nannies are so wonderful together and help each other to tea like mad. It’s so good for Em,³ my nanny says, to have other children, can you imagine at her age!! They are awfully good and it really is utter heaven having them, I shall never have more glorious guests.

If only you were here it would be perfect.

Best love to Sir O.

All love, Debo

Lady Redesdale’s permit to visit Diana in Holloway.

Dearest Hen

It is so wonderful about you getting married, do write and tell if Mr Treuhaft¹ is a Hon, I’m sure he must be a tremendous one, I do die to see him or even a photograph, do try & send something, we all so die to see. Have you fully instructed him about Honnish embraces, Andrew has become quite good and will show everyone all the time.

Oh dear I do long to see you measuring trees, do write & tell. And as for investigating I wish you’d come and investigate about the huge rent here.²

We’ve moved in here for the war, at least I say we but it’s me & Em really as Andrew hasn’t been able to get away to see it although we’ve been in for 4 weeks. I hope he’ll get a short weekend soon but they work so hard I doubt even that. He is on the Yorkshire moors now, bitter cold poor soul. Otherwise everything goes on as usual, London is rather drear though, no one much there and everything v. expensive. We have tremendous pony cart life here as there is no petrol.

Kick Kennedy is in London, it is lovely to have her back, did you like her, I do awfully.

I long to see Constancia, she must be so fascinating, that photograph of you & her was heaven. Do send some more. The difficulty here is one can’t get films, perhaps it’s difficult with you too?

Well dear if anything of note or interest occurs I’ll write again. Be an old Hen & write to yr Hen.

Will you stay in San Francisco now or will you go lumbering off to Seattle? Do you remember how poor Bird always longed to go there.

Farve’s operation was a miracle almost, it was too dreadful to see him quite blind.

Well dear cheery cheer, Henderson

Darling Nancy

Many happy returns darling. The present was mingy beyond belief, I rather wish it had got lost in the post.

Woman is being simply too killing, we are besieged by hordes of pressmen & photographers¹ & every now and then she rushes out and says, ‘I dislike you intensely’ or when photo-ed, ‘You foul man’. She doesn’t in the least realize what a wonder-working woman she is being. We ourselves just stay in the house with the curtains drawn and I would rather be us than them because it is the most frightful weather. I hope you all go to the demonstration in Trafalgar Sq this afternoon, I wish I could go.

It is such paradise just not to be in gaol that it is indescribable. Did you see Bernard Shaw in D. Express.²

Could you keep the Wieland³ just till I know where we are going or is it a great trial to you – being so many vols I rather dread it in our luggage.

Desmond tells me that one master at Summer Fields says I ought to be shot. ‘Yes’ said Jonathan, ‘he is an old menace’.

I do LONG for a chat with you but of course I shall never be able to come to London.

Best love, D

¹

Darling,

A girl I know was in Trafalgar Sq that day trying to get to the tube. In order to do so she was obliged to join a queue & shout in unison ‘Put Him Back’. If you didn’t shout you were flung out of the queue & no chance of getting to the Underground! Then she had to stop twice & sign things – also in order to keep her place. After which she was very late for tea. You must say.

Just had a wonderful weekend at Faringdon. I hear Gerald [Berners] is going to stay with you.

Best love, NR

Darling Honks

I do think it’s so wonderful about Nicky getting the MC,¹ Sir O must be nearly dying of excitement.

I do disgusting work now, do feel sorry for me. It’s in the YMCA canteen and it’s v. embarrassing because they all copy my voice.

No more news of Andrew – I do hope he comes soon.

All love & millions of congratulations on Nicky’s wonderfulness. Debo

Get on

I don’t appreciate the SHORT NOTES I have received from you, my frail fingers are well able to open a VERY LONG letter so kindly write one.

Well Mornington¹ is too comic for words, he is fast going bald but the nurse still tries to make a parting and the result is he looks exactly like his grandpapa Devonshire. I went dry after two days. I meant to feed him but I’m quite pleased now as I shan’t be tied. Muv looked v. disapproving when we decided to give up the unequal struggle. It was too wonderful having her here.

Oh the fury on all sides about the baby’s names. The dowager duch has been heard to say she wouldn’t be surprised if the Duke of Wellington sued us for using his name. But surely if Mrs Cannon could call her son Morny why shouldn’t I.² Anyhow they are Andrew’s choice so all the critics can go to hell. I am calling him Morny but I expect Andrew will call him Peregrine. I haven’t heard from him that he’s heard but hope to this week.

William (Billy) Hartington, Deborah’s brother-in-law, and Kathleen (Kick) Kennedy were married on 6 May 1944, despite opposition from both sets of parents.

Isn’t it a do about Billy getting off, I am so pleased & so is Andrew and I can’t get over the wonderful luck of having Kick for a sister-in-law as she is far the nicest girl ever. Poor things they must be thankful to have actually got spliced after all these years.³

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