Читать книгу The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters - Charlotte Mosley - Страница 13

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