The Pursuit of Laughter (2 page)

My sister Diana was the fourth child and third daughter of our parents, then David and Sydney Mitford. Three more daughters were born, so she was midway between the eldest (Nancy) and the youngest (myself).

An aura of beauty surrounded her; she was always the best-looking woman at any gathering, without make-up or artifice, and often wearing clothes till they were threadbare. She was beautiful when she was born in 1910 and remained beautiful till her death aged 93. An acquaintance, who had not seen her for 50 years, was walking behind her in a Paris street and immediately recognised her, so distinctive was her walk.

It was Diana’s beauty which made the first impression, but she had other qualities any one of which would have made her memorable.

Her ‘education’ was sketchy to say the least, depending on the talent (or lack of) of a single teacher, a governess, who had charge of all four energetic and opinionated children of varying ages, interests and abilities—none of them submissive or obedient. School, which Diana dreaded, was not a threat because my father did not allow it then.

When the childhood home of Batsford Park, Moreton-in-Marsh, was sold in 1919 my father bought Asthall Manor on the fringe of his estate near Burford. The ancient house had a barn nearby which he converted into a library for the Batsford books. The four elder children had bedrooms above, separate from the main house. My brother Tom’s beloved piano was installed and there the teenagers could do as they pleased, uninterrupted by grown-ups, as long as they were punctual for meals and anything else which depended on my father’s strict rules of punctuality. The books and Tom’s music were their education.

Diana was 16 when we moved to Swinbrook House. This was a farmhouse a mile or so from the village, much enlarged by my father for his family, now seven with the arrival of three more girls.

The older ones lost their independence with the barn. They minded it more than my parents ever knew, nowhere now to themselves to sit, read, talk and play the piano, but they must share the drawing room with all who came or sit in their small bedrooms. The books were now in my father’s study, where he was not to be disturbed.

Diana began to fret and longed to be grown up and away. She was sent to Paris to learn French and there she met the painter Paul César Helleu, a friend of our Bowles
grandfather
, who had made several portraits of my mother and was an immediate admirer of
Diana. He was the first of many who sat at her feet, spellbound.

She married Bryan Guinness when she was 18 and soon found that her natural friends were writers: Lytton Strachey, Harold Acton, Robert Byron, Henry Yorke, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman and many more became her companions.

The marriage did not last and in 1933 she moved with her two little Guinness sons to a house in Eaton Square where she could meet the man who from then on filled her entire life. Sir Oswald Mosley was married. There was no question of him leaving his wife for Diana, as politics was his passion and divorce would have ended his career. She accepted this state of affairs without question.

Diana’s decision was shocking to my parents. Nearly 80 years ago moral standards were different and divorce carried a stigma. So deeply did they feel about it and the
circumstances
of her new life that my sister Jessica and I were not allowed to go to her house. It never occurred to us to question our parents’ wishes and I did not get to know Diana well until after the war. It was not until after the unexpected death from peritonitis of Lady Cynthia Mosley that they were free to marry.

Diana and her next sister Unity often went to Germany in the 1930s where they met and made friends with Hitler and some of his intimates. Both Hitler and Goebbels (Frau Goebbels was a particular friend of Diana’s) were present at Diana’s secret wedding with Oswald Mosley in 1936. Our family knew nothing of it until much later.

I believe Diana was the only person to know Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler well. Clementine Churchill was my father’s first cousin and Diana and Tom Mitford were
frequent
guests at Chartwell, Diana Churchill being our Diana’s greatest friend.

With the birth of two more sons, all her energies were now devoted to making a home for Mosley and supporting his ideas in politics.

Their long imprisonment without trial from spring 1940 to autumn 1943 denied her her four little boys. This must have had a deep effect on Diana though, such was her self discipline, it was never apparent to acquaintances.

She did not wish to be a public figure in her own right, to stand for Parliament or
otherwise
take part in staged events. She took the old fashioned role of total unfailing
support
of the husband she adored. A lesser person might have given up the unequal
struggle
against his unpopular views and a vehemently hostile press. After his death she leapt to his defence whenever the media produced an unfair or inaccurate picture of Mosley.

Diana’s loyalty was proved once more in her efforts to see the ailing Duchess of Windsor during her prolonged and lonely final illness, ‘her living death’. The Duchess’s butler, Georges (afterwards decorated by the Queen for devoted service to the Duchess), had orders not to allow anyone in. Many times Diana took flowers, although she knew that a visit was forbidden.

She was always a great reader, hungry for literature and intellectually superior to her sisters. In her nineties she read and re-read German and French classics in the original, particularly Goethe and Proust.

Although she wrote brilliant letters all her life, Diana didn’t start writing for publication until the 1950s. The words flowed easily. Like her sisters Nancy and Jessica, she was always very much herself—a debunker of pomposity and pretensions. She could conjure up a scene in a few words—describing Gerald Berners’ house ‘Faringdon, with a view of half England from its five drawing room windows’, and Paul Mellon, whom she admired as a collector and philanthropist, ‘sails through the eye of a needle with ease’.

Many of these reviews were for
Books and Bookmen
and the
Evening Standard
. She delighted in reviewing for the former, as she could decide the length of her piece. The newspaper was more widely read but was restrictive in length.

When she moved to a flat in Paris as a widow she was 89. It was near the office of
Vogue
magazine. Passing their window she was unconscious of the fact that the girls pressed their faces to the glass to see this elegant, upright great-granny to twenty-two walking by. She had become a legend.

During the move from their house at Orsay to the Paris flat her daughter-in-law Charlotte (married to Alexander) was her prop and stay. She arranged everything and looked after Diana as if she were her own mother. Diana loved her deeply and this relationship was a joy in her last years.

In middle-and old-age her rare ability to make new and much younger friends was not so much an effort on her part as a necessity on theirs to hold onto her brilliant company and sympathetic nature. Those who worked for her felt the same affection.

It was interesting to see her with people who were prejudiced against her politically or in any other way. You could watch the hackles go down as the person slowly succumbed to the charm and intelligence he met so unexpectedly.

Her honesty floored her critics. They did not expect it and did not know how to deal with it.

In the memorable television interview with Russell Harty, her interrogator was
several
times at a loss as to what to ask next when her reply was truthful, with no hiding behind meaningless words in the style to which we have become accustomed when listening to our politicians. At the end of the interview, the camera dwelt for a moment too long on Mr Harty, who gave a visible and audible ‘Phew!’ in thankfulness that it was over.

This book of her collected writing reflects her character. She was usually generous minded—of Cynthia Gladwyn, wife of an erstwhile ambassador in Paris, Diana wrote, ‘I suppose I must declare an interest. She says in her diary that I am evil.’ In spite of this strange statement Cynthia asked Diana to review her book on the British embassy in Paris and a favourable piece was published.

She could also be stingingly sarcastic, describing the old political adversaries Winston Churchill, Duff Cooper and the like. Churchill campaigning in the election of 1945 ‘with his cigar, his grin and his V sign’. Duff Cooper tells of ‘praise of his own talents’ and how his ‘heart felt lighter than it had felt for a year’ when he heard of the outbreak of war in 1939, and that night at the Savoy Grill he ‘dealt very successfully with a cold grouse’. What
would Diana have made of his diaries and boastings of female conquests, published recently?

Of a passage in Selina Hastings’
Evelyn Waugh
, which listed his misdoings, Diana wrote, ‘If Selina could have spent one single day with Evelyn, how enormously she would have appreciated the irresistible charm of the man, the cleverness, the sharply expressed and individual point of view, the wonderful jokes, the laughter!’

Evelyn ‘quarrelled with Henry Yorke and Randolph Churchill, both alcoholics like himself. All died in their late fifties or early sixties—their lives a sort of temperance tract.’ Her perception of character was uncanny and this comes to light throughout her work.

Diana’s political views and the opposite ones held by my sister Jessica were irrelevant to me from my apolitical stance. After years I still miss her letters and long to see her
writing
on the envelope with a French stamp. They were unique. Nothing can take their place. With her death so much in my life has disappeared for ever. But this volume reveals as much of her as it does of the people, books and places she describes. That is why I am so pleased to write this foreword.

The 30s and 40s

‘Excuse me,’ said a taxi driver as he deposited Lord Longford at his Chelsea flat, not long after the Copenhagen visit. ‘I can never remember your other name. I know you’re Lord Porn, of course, but your other name slips my memory.’ Lord Longford likes publicity. He considers that even ‘bad’ or ridiculous publicity helps his good causes. He is an inveterate, untiring do-gooder, who needs must love the lowest when he sees it. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’; the poorer in spirit the better, for him. If he has a fault (and I am not saying he has) it might be a grain of spiritual pride. As a prison visitor of renown he makes a bee-line for those convicted of the most horrible crimes. Possibly he likes sinners better than publicans, but he prefers either to the general run of hypocritical Pharisees.

Lord Longford is a clever man, the devoted husband of a brilliant wife and father of notable children. Ambitious, he has been a success in politics, several times holding high office, and also a success in the City as chairman of a bank. He is the author of an
excellent
book about de Valera and the Irish treaty,
Peace by Ordeal
. Mary Craig has discovered a great deal about his private life and his public life. She has written an enjoyable book, but it does not convey his charm; he emerges from her biography as an incorrigible oddity.

Apparently when Longford was given the Garter, Lord Mountbatten said it was an imaginative appointment, and Lord Longford was rather offended. After all, he
complained
, he was not a pop singer, but had been Leader of the House of Lords for years. I cannot help agreeing with Lord Mountbatten; it is very difficult indeed to think of Lord Longford as a knight, although he did once take part in a fight. This was in 1936 at a Mosley meeting in Oxford, where he got hurt and after which he changed his political allegiance from Conservative to Labour.

Frank Pakenham (as he then was) describes the scene:

Christopher Mayhew (the Labour MP) was an eye-witness.

‘Unfortunately’ (Frank goes on) ‘I was fighting according to Queensberry rules, and they’re not very effective against steel chairs and bicycle belts. So I got knocked to the ground, dragging some of the Fascists with me. Then someone stamped on my kidneys and put me out of action.’

What is a ‘bicycle belt’? I have heard of a bicycle chain, but never of a bicycle belt. The blackshirts’ leather belts had nothing to do with bicycles. When they were assailed by huge Frank and the steel chair he hoped to smash them with, they may have wished they too had a weapon, but they were a disciplined body of men, and they were fighting in full view of Mosley up on the platform. They were allowed to use only their bare hands when
ejecting
trouble-makers or resisting attack. I doubt whether Lord Queensberry, when he made his rules, would have permitted the bashing of opponents with a steel chair. And in some mysterious way the steel chair has changed hands as the story goes on; it is no longer Frank but the blackshirts who are using it, along with their mythical bicycle belts.

It so happens that I was also an eye-witness, and the Pakenham version is wide of the mark. Mosley paid no attention to sillies like Basil Murray saying Red Front. Undergraduates opened newspapers and pretended to read them, ostentatiously rustling them. Mosley said he was glad to see the young gentlemen were studying as he had heard they were backward with their lessons. This mild sarcasm was the signal for the
undergraduates
and what Frank calls the busmen to jump up, shouting, and seizing their steel chairs to attack the stewards. They had not come to ‘heckle’, they hoped to break up the meeting; but they were quickly put out of the hall, and then Mosley spoke to a large
audience
for an hour, and answered questions as usual. Another eye-witness was the Chief Constable of Oxford. When Maurice Bowra, who had not been present, wrote a Pakenham-like account of the meeting in his memoirs, the Chief Constable sent him a
letter
saying he had been unfair; Sir Oswald was very patient with interrupters until members of the audience started shouting, he wrote.

About the change of political allegiance, Lord Longford has said: ‘Short of a change of sex, my life could hardly have been altered more radically.’

Faith, hope and charity, the greatest of these is charity. Longford is charitable. He does not give a fig for any of the things that make life worth living here below; art and music pass him by; even to good food he is indifferent. ‘Feeding him,’ says a friend, ‘is like
filling
up a car with petrol.’ He was once asked whether he saw himself as a success or a
failure
; his thoughts flew to St Peter. ‘Of course, the question of success or failure in the worldly sense will not be the crucial one in front of St Peter. Nor will it be totally
irrelevant
.
He will surely want to know how far we have used the talents given to us.’ I suppose we can guess St Peter’s verdict. But what will Frank find to do up there? No more porn, no more prisons, no more injustice. Heaven knows, is the safest answer.

Another Christian socialist is Dr Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark.
The Cross and the Sickle
is a provocative title, but on the whole he wants what we all want: decent housing, less violence in the streets, a better life for everyone. How to get these things, that is the question. Perhaps he was carrying charity too far in allowing the Foreign Secretary to write a foreword. Short as it is, Dr Owen can only manage a sort of pidgin English. ‘He identifies [sic] that they have no value-oriented philosophy…’ Oh dear. Maybe his first language is Welsh.

Both Lord Longford and the Bishop of Southwark are now doing their utmost to help the victims of crime. Since in the past their charity has inclined them to hate the sin and love the sinner, rather forgetting the sinned against, this is important. Violent crime is one of the few growth industries in socialist Britain, and they are Christian socialists, both great favourites with the newspapers as well as members of the House of Lords. I hope this clever and charming pair will continue to struggle against crime, and porn, for many years to come, until St Peter takes them over.

Longford: A Biography,
Craig, M.
Books and Bookmen
(1978)

Reading this memoir of my sister Nancy a thousand memories came flooding in of
childhood
, youth and age; of the fun, the oddities, the loves and quarrels which I suppose every big family knows. Ours was a babel of voices, arguments and laughter, and most of the laughter originated in my father who was to become Nancy’s best ‘character’ as Uncle Matthew.

Do people change as they grow older, and if they do, which of their selves should the memorialist concentrate upon in order to distil the essence of the personality and bring it before those who never knew and never can know from their own experience? Perhaps Nancy changed rather little, less than most people; only the circumstances of her life changed. Harold Acton has wonderfully succeeded in finding the essential Nancy. He has understood her motives. He has understood that ‘laughter was the golden key to Nancy’s heart’, as he says. She could never resist a joke, and she could never resist a tease. Other temptations she resisted. Money, for example, which she needed, greatly loved and
successfully
earned, and which rightly occupies a large place in this book, she could resist. She was offered immense sums to go to Hollywood for six months, and she refused. It should be added that having earned some money she gave it away with both hands to friends and relations.

Teasing gave her intense pleasure. Like many of the English she loved France and Paris; French food, French clothes, the beauties of the French eighteenth century. But simply to love was not enough, for nobody would be surprised, let alone put out, by that. She wanted people to gasp and stretch their eyes, therefore every other country without exception must be written down in order that France should take its rightful place, hardly upon earth but in a special paradise. Her fantasies and exaggerations where anything French was concerned were limitless. I have heard her describe a very ordinary, if
pleasant
, Paris flat as though it were both Trianons and half a dozen English stately homes complete with their art collections rolled into one. Rome, on the other hand, was
according
to her a village with a vicarage called the Vatican. Thus she managed to use her predilection for France as an all-purpose, hard-wearing tease.

If there is such a thing as objective truth Nancy never bothered about it. If she caught one half-laughing at some observation she knew one knew to be hardly in accordance with the facts, she would as a rule laugh too.

She sometimes went too far in her teasing, but she never minded the counter-attack. She was delighted with a letter from an Irishman after her quaint article on Ireland was published. ‘Dear Miss Mitford, Hell would be a more fitting place for you than Ireland.’ Evelyn Waugh, friend of a lifetime, teased her unkindly in a silly book they both
contributed
to,
Noblesse Oblige
. But Harold Acton is undoubtedly right when he says this was because of her socialism. Evelyn could hardly forgive her when, in common with a
majority
of her countrymen, she voted Labour in 1945. It was as if, unaided, she had brought socialism to power in England, and then had promptly gone away to live in France. When the result of the election was declared Nancy was still in London working in the
bookshop
. Osbert Sitwell flew in, seized the till, and ran out in the street with it shouting ‘Labour has begun!’

In France, a dedicated Gaullist, she could see no fault in anything that happened
during
the General’s years in office. She remained blind to the ruin of beautiful vistas within Paris due to the savage building of tower blocks exactly where they should not have been. One even heard her say apropos of tower blocks in other cities: ‘That would never be allowed in Paris.’

All this mixture of teasing, loyalty and wildest fantasy was Nancy the romancer, the novelist. As historian she was scrupulously accurate and took great pains to check facts. Naturally, like every historian under the sun, she chose among the facts what it suited her to choose; but she did not invent. As the years went by she wrote better and better; her very last book,
Frederick the Great
, is a little masterpiece.

The best of companions, with a talent to amuse, Nancy had a real talent for
friendship
. One of her friends, Violet Trefusis, heroine of the Harold Nicolsons’ ideal marriage, was a great trial to her. She was overjoyed when Violet, perhaps jealous of the successes as a writer she herself had never attained, sent her a furiously rude letter. Telling me of it she said, ‘Isn’t it perfect, now I need never see Violet again.’ A few years later Violet
wanted
to make up, and telephoned: ‘I’m sorry if I gave offence.’ Nancy: ‘You didn’t give offence, but you did give me an excuse.’ The ideal rejoinder.