The Pursuit of Laughter (73 page)

Occasionally I saw Hitler; we dined and watched a film or talked by the fire. We did not discuss the radio project, it was the sort of thing that bored him and was left to his ministers. He worked in Berlin but never stayed there longer than was necessary, much preferring Munich and the Obersalzberg.

Finally it was the Minister of Posts, Ohnesorge, who, though initially unwilling to
relinquish
a wavelength, saw the point of it for Germany’s foreign currency position and became my valuable ally. We got the concession in May 1938; it had taken me nearly two years. The terms were tough—Germany got more foreign currency out of it than France had got from Plugge. Of course, written into the contract was the purely commercial nature of the station. There was to be nothing controversial, no politics or propaganda, nothing but sport, or sweet music and beauty hints, and similar delights. It was aimed at the housewife, and would have covered eastern England including the whole London area. As was said of commercial television years later, and as Plugge had discovered, it was a
licence to print money.

Shortly before our first son, Alexander, was born, Kit and I went to Paris and he met the German who had been assigned to work with us, a brilliant member of Goering’s Four Year Plan team. I took the monthly nurse with me to Paris in case the baby decided to be born, but he did not, and we went back to London with the agreement signed and sealed. A week or two later I had the baby and Kit announced our marriage of two years before; there was no more reason for secrecy. Just when broadcasting would have begun, the
following
summer, Britain declared war on Germany and our house of cards collapsed.

In the two years leading up to the war, and particularly after the Munich settlement in 1938, considered to have been a diplomatic defeat for the democracies, the possibility of war was present in everyone’s mind. Kit maintained that Chamberlain should have gone to the country and had an election after Munich; he would have won it with ease. The vociferous war faction within the Conservative Party had not much echo, and the Left had made itself ridiculous by calling for war and at the same time opposing rearmament and voting against the service estimates. Kit said: ‘The Labour Party is always for war on three conditions; that the war serves no British interest, that we have no arms to fight with and that none of the Labour leaders is expected to join up.’ Thus, though many people either hoped for war or thought it inevitable, many others did not. Rearmament, which Kit had been demanding for years past, was stepped up.

My frequent visits to Berlin in 1937 and early 1938 did not go unobserved. I assumed that the famous Secret Service knew why I was there. I only tried to avoid the Press; in any case, the newspapers were interested in Unity, not in me. It was not difficult for the Secret Service to put one and one together: Bill Allen, advertising; Eckersley, radio engineer; myself hanging about doing nothing and then seeing the Minister of Posts. In fact, it appears that the transaction was known but not its terms, or that, compared with Plugge’s concession from France, our concession was more profitable to Germany. It seems to have been imagined that it was a gift to us from the Germans. Had it been so I should not have been obliged to go to Berlin at all, or to argue the Allens’ case with any minister. On the contrary, for Germany the foreign currency it would have earned was the whole point of the business, just as it was for France.

At the end of July 1939 Unity and I were invited to the Bayreuth Festival, where we saw Hitler frequently. He stayed at the Siegfried Wagner Haus at Wahnfried. On our last day he told us that in his opinion war was inevitable. The British guarantee to Poland had convinced the Poles that in some unexplained way we should come to their assistance if they resisted the absorption of the German city of Danzig into the Reich. This terrible news was not unexpected; in Britain preparations for war were evident in every sphere.

I knew Unity would not survive. She had always said that if England and Germany went to war she would prefer to die; her loyalties were too fatally divided. I told Hitler I thought my husband would continue to campaign for peace, as he had been doing for the
past year. ‘If he does he will probably be assassinated, like Jaurès in 1914 [the murdered French Socialist politician],’ said Hitler.

A few months before, George Orwell had written to Herbert Read: ‘I don’t know whether Mosley will have the sense and the guts to stick out against war with Germany, he might decide to cash in on the patriotism business.’ As we know, he had the sense and the guts. He did what he did because he foresaw that, win or lose, we should emerge from the war diminished, and because he was convinced that war solves nothing. In other words it was the ‘patriotism business’ that made him take a stand which is always unpopular and often dangerous.

On the outbreak of war he and I were in London; all the children, including Michael and his aunt Lady Ravensdale, went to Wootton, considered fairly safe from the bombing which many people imagined would follow our declaration of war. My thoughts were with Unity; there was no news.

On 1 September Kit issued a statement to his followers:

Practically all our members of military age, including my brother Tom, were already in the services, or in the process of joining.

If at the beginning of the war the government had said there was to be no more free speech for the duration, Kit would have conducted no campaign for negotiated peace. On the contrary, however, it was continually emphasized that abolition of free speech was one of the evil things we were fighting against, and therefore to have kept silent would have been cowardly in the extreme.

There was a long tradition in England of political opposition to war, from Chatham in the American War of Independence, Fox in the Napoleonic Wars down to Lloyd George in the Boer War and Ramsay MacDonald in the 1914 War. The latter two were assaulted by the public at their meetings, but Kit never was. There was not much enthusiasm for war over Danzig. He advocated a negotiated peace unless Britain or the Empire were
threatened
or attacked, combined with rearmament. It was we who had declared war, but the German army had moved east. The Polish campaign was quickly over; Russia occupied the eastern half of the country and for the following seven months we had the phoney war. There was a flurry among Conservatives when Russia attacked Finland and voices were raised in Parliament in favour of aiding the gallant Finns. Harold Macmillan hoped to join in this fight and bought a white fur hat, but the Finns gave in. He was able to wear his hat
years later for a Russian Summit and told the Press the origin of his curious headgear. Although I was again pregnant I often went to Kit’s meetings at this time. There was never the slightest disturbance—large crowds listened quietly to what he had to say, and
applauded
him. There were times during the phoney war when it was possible to believe that
neither
side would attack and that there could be negotiations with no loss of face. We had news of Unity from a Hungarian friend, Janos von Almasy, who wrote from Budapest. After she shot herself on the morning war was declared she had been rushed to a clinic where her life was saved by devoted nuns. She was unconscious for weeks, and had
suffered
brain damage. Hitler asked her, when she was able to understand his question, whether she would like to go back to her family in England. She said she would, and he sent her to neutral Switzerland in an ambulance train; she was brought home by my
mother
and my sister Debo early in January. All this tragic story I have described in my
memoirs
.

We had spent Christmas for the last time at Wootton but we had to give it up; it was too unpractical, too big, too remote. Kit and I stayed in London until my baby, Max, was born in April and then the whole family went to Denham. From London and Denham I could see Unity constantly; she was very gradually recovering.

In May 1940 the German armies moved west. On 9 May Kit published a statement in his weekly paper,
Action
:

The phoney war was now at an end. Kit was arrested on the 23 May, a fortnight after his belligerent statement was published. At the time of the fall of France and the escape of our armies from Dunkirk, he was in gaol. It was then that many politicians began to talk of negotiated peace.

I have described our prison experiences in my memoirs,
A Life of Contrasts
, and shall not repeat here. In June 1940, a month after his arrest, Kit was told that his sister-in-law, Lady Ravensdale, intended to apply to the court for the guardianship of his three elder children. He insisted upon going to oppose this move in person. He had a ‘special
relationship
’ with both Cimmie’s sisters, but despite—or perhaps because of—this he would not have considered either a suitable guardian, and he knew how strongly Cimmie would have objected to the idea. He felt quite certain he would shortly be released from prison, having already been heard at great length by the 18B Advisory Committee. Had he known
that he was to be locked up for three and a half more years he might hardly have opposed Irene Ravensdale’s guardianship so violently, as she was obviously
de facto
the children’s guardian. He did his best to veto a plan to send Michael, aged eight, to Canada, and in this the judge agreed with him. But with regard to Irene he was over-ruled. His letter to me describing all this and asking me to write to Nicholas inviting him to stay when he should be back in a house of his own, and also to thank Nicholas’s housemaster Mr Butter-wick for their pleasant relationship and tell him henceforward to send all communications to Lady Ravensdale, was sent to Denham, and for warded to Holloway Prison, as I had
meantime
been arrested myself. I was therefore unable to deliver his messages.

In the long run this guardianship question made little difference; as usual heredity took over from environment to a great extent. But Kit was extraordinarily incensed by it. He had tried so hard to be a good father, a role which did not come easily to him, and he had succeeded. Irene’s action seemed to him as unnecessary as it was insulting. Although they were both minors in law, Vivien and Nicholas were grown up; nineteen and seventeen. I was surprised that they did not object, or at least go and see their father to discover what he felt about Irene’s move. When I asked them years later, it transpired they had no idea he minded; their aunt with an odd lack of candour had never told them that Kit had
insisted
upon going from prison to the court in order to oppose it in person.

However, his annoyance was soon forgotten in his frantic worry about me. He was powerless to help, and his feelings can easily be imagined. He knew from his own
experience
the degradation and filth of prison. I was nursing my baby, eleven weeks old, and he imagined me getting every sort of infection and fever. His letters enjoined me to get hold of Mr Gilliatt, the gynaecologist, without delay—an impossibility. I could not take the baby; France had fallen and bombs were expected to fall on London any day. Denham had been requisitioned by the army and the babies and I had been going to my sister in Oxfordshire on the Monday, but on Saturday I was taken off to prison. After a few days of miserable pain, I recovered.

Henceforward Kit’s attitude to his elder children changed. He was fond of them, they were always welcome, but he felt no more responsibility for them; they had been taken from him against his forcibly expressed will. Nicholas stayed on at school as long as
possible
until he was called up. By then Kit and I were imprisoned together in Holloway. It was inexpressibly bitter for him to think that his son might be killed in the war, and die before he had begun to live, as had so many of his own contemporaries in the First World War. We got permission for Nicholas to come for longer visits to the prison. Kit felt
deepest
compassion for him, and tried in conversation and in letters to show affection, and to interest him in books and ideas which filled his own mind at that time. My sons Jonathan and Desmond were allowed similarly long visits, and so were the two babies, during this fourth year of our incarceration.

It is probably quite difficult for someone who has not experienced it to imagine how demoralizing it is to be imprisoned without trial. It is like being kidnapped—you cannot
see the end. If you are charged, and there is a trial, either you are found not guilty and released at once, or you are sentenced, and can count the days of vileness. No charge, no trial. No trial, no sentence. After Kit’s appearance and interrogation by Birkett’s Advisory Committee he felt completely certain he would be released; his letters to me show this. Instead, I was arrested myself. Nevertheless hope never quite faded. It revived when
occasionally
the question of Regulation 18B was raised in the House of Commons, or when Churchill had the decency to say there had never been a fifth column in England. Also, people
were
released from time to time, for no apparent reason, just as they had been arrested for no apparent reason in the first place. This constant uncertainty, added to rumours flying round the prison about being transferred to a concentration camp, or another prison, made nearly everyone live from day to day, doing nothing because
nothing
seemed worth doing or beginning.