Decca, p.3
Decca, page 3
Decca’s parents were Conservatives to the core, comforted by the motto on the Redesdale coat of arms: “God careth for us.” Decca dated her earliest awareness of the inequities of the English class system to walks she used to take with her mother near their rural Swinbrook home, bearing small charitable gifts for the “village people.” Disturbed by the villagers’ poverty, she recalled asking her mother one day why all the English people’s money wasn’t divided among everyone, so that no one would be so desperately poor. Her mother, she said, replied, “But that’s what Socialists want,” explaining that “Socialists want everyone to be poor, but we Conservatives want everyone to be rich.” Although she never forgot the anecdote, it was years later before she rebelled against the family’s politics. At the time of the general strike in England, when she was nearly nine, she recalled being “a confirmed Tory” and harboring fears of being shot by the “Bolshies.” She volunteered in the strikebreakers’ canteens—a fact that she probably refrained from mentioning when she later joined the Communist Party.
Her early rebellions were apolitical in nature, like the time when she was forbidden from visiting the estates of shocked neighboring families because she had passed along to her dancing-class friends some information she’d picked up about “conception and [the] birth of babies.”
In her early and midteens, Decca followed her oldest sister and role model Nancy to the left, becoming an “avid reader” of, first, pacifist literature. “By age 12, influenced by Nancy,” she wrote in one letter, “I was a crashing intellectual snob.” Decca then developed a broader interest in Communist and other left-wing periodicals, pamphlets, and books. As she became more earnest and excited about her newfound socialist insights—“suddenly confronted for the first time with a rational explanation of society”—she grew disenchanted with Nancy and her fashionably witty friends, who “didn’t take anything very seriously.”
Decca once wrote to her grandson James Forman that at about the age of fifteen, “the clarity, the brilliance, the total solution to horrors of war & mass poverty contained in the Communist Manifesto & other writings… burst on me like fireworks.”
Thus began her growing estrangement from her parents and class, which continued as she sulked through weekend house parties and fulfilled the coming-of-age rituals demanded of her. “You’ve no idea of the boredom (to me, anyway) of the company,” Decca once wrote to the writer Alex Haley. “Try to visualize twittering debutantes and what we (or I, at least) used to call Chinless Wonders, i.e. the deb escorts—goodness they were DULL fellows. What did we talk about? The latest dance, the next ball, who was going.” The rituals culminated with her formal presentation at court before “what appear to be two large stuffed figures, nodding and smiling down from their thrones like woundup toys.”
Decca started confronting her parents on their political views, which her mother evidently took as a generalized sign of her unhappiness. She recalled at one point accusing her mother of being “an Enemy of the Working Class.” The “genuinely stung” and angry Lady Redesdale is said to have replied, “I’m not an enemy of the working class! I think some of them are perfectly sweet!”
Nancy Mitford, thirteen years Decca’s elder, was a distant model at best by her teenage years. The only brother, Tom, eight years older, had been sent away to school, as boys were, and was also a less immediate influence. And Pam, born between Nancy and Tom, was so different in temperament and interests, as well as age, that she was hardly an influence at all.
As young women, the two sisters to whom Decca felt most attached—the beautiful and supportive Diana, her elder by seven years, and the ungainly, outrageously quirky Unity, three years older, who was Decca’s contemporary in the governesses’ schoolroom—followed their parents to the right … about as far right as they could go. Diana, after three years of marriage to beer heir Bryan Guinness, scandalized her family and her country by divorcing him and beginning an ill-disguised affair with the then-married Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, whom she later married at the Berlin home of powerful Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler in attendance at the wedding dinner. Still later, during the Second World War, Diana was confined with Mosley in prison. With the exception of their joint appearance at ailing Nancy Mitford’s bedside in 1969, Decca was “off speakers” with Diana for the rest of her life.
At the age of eighteen, Unity, Decca’s teenage comrade-in-rebellion against their parents, was a debutante in London and frequently visited Diana and her paramour. Decca believed Unity was fascinated by Mosley and his uniform and “fascinated with the idea of belonging to something.” At about the time Unity joined Mosley’s British Union of Fascists—the Blackshirts—Decca, fifteen, resolved to become a Communist, leading to almost comical competing household displays of posters, swastikas, and hammer and sickles. They threw books and records at each other in their common sitting room “until Nanny would come and stop the noise.” Decca sang the “Internationale” with Communist sympathizers she encountered on Sunday walks through London’s Hyde Park with her governess, she later reported. Unity gave the stiff-armed Nazi salute to townsfolk and flaunted her BUF membership and increasingly right-wing views on a far larger stage.
In 1933, Unity traveled to Germany with Diana and attended the Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg. It was, Diana later wrote, a trip that “changed Unity’s life.” While Decca and her cousin Ann Farrer were in Paris for their traditional predebutante “year abroad,” Unity took up residence in Munich, which their mother called “her spiritual home.” She soon became an obsessed Hitler “groupie,” plotting to catch the Führer’s eye, and basked in his company by special invitation, in Munich and elsewhere. Published photographs showed Unity visiting with Hitler, attending Nazi events, and giving the “sieg heil” salute. Among her most treasured possessions was the Nazi Party badge given her by Hitler.
Later, Diana and Unity introduced their parents into Hitler’s circle, and both were impressed. Lady Redesdale was especially taken with the Führer and fascism and maintained her allegiance long after her husband publicly repudiated his. After a 1937 tea party with Hitler, who incidentally “asked after” Decca, Lady Redesdale gushed in a letter, “He is very ‘easy’ to be with & no feeling of shyness would be possible, & such very good manners.” Decca’s reaction: “I was through with the whole lot of them.” (Many years later, speaking of her family during this period, Decca commented to a friend, “Do admit they were a rum bunch, & that I’m the only ordinary one of the lot.”) Her parents’ growing rift on fascism was an important factor in their eventual separation during the war.
At the age of seventeen, as Decca endured the predebutante social rounds and brooded about a way to realize her fervent commitment to leftist causes, the activities of her second cousins, Esmond and Giles Romilly, captured her attention. The pacifist brothers were in open rebellion against the Officers Training Corps at Wellington College, their fashionable military prep school, where they disrupted Armistice Day observances by distributing pacifist leaflets in the prayerbooks. They edited a magazine called Out of Bounds, billed as “an exposé of the English public school system.” Decca wrote in Daughters and Rebels* that “Esmond’s abrupt conversion to Communist ideas had come about in a way very similar to my own. He wrote: ‘I had a violent antipathy to Conservatism, as I saw it in my relations. I hated militarism … and I had read a good deal of pacifist literature. Like many people, I mixed up pacifism with Communism.’” And like Decca, he chanced upon the Communists’ Daily Worker and began subscribing.
Esmond Romilly ran away from the school at the age of fifteen, trailing headlines about “Winston’s ‘Red’ Nephew.” He entered London’s leftist/ bohemian demimonde, editing his magazine and making a living as best he could, for one stretch as a door-to-door salesman. Decca took careful note from afar when Esmond Romilly was detained by police after showing up drunk at his parents’ house with another public school runaway, his chum Philip Toynbee. Romilly was declared uncontrollable, sentenced to six weeks in a facility for delinquent boys, and released as a ward of his wealthy elderly cousin Dorothy Allhusen, a widow who was very close to Esmond and whose own son had died in childhood. In her country house Romilly completed the book Out of Bounds, coauthored with his brother and chronicling their controversial radical activities. Decca read it with admiration when it was published in 1935.
Decca’s world continued to splinter as her beloved sister Unity became an ever more flagrant fascist. Unity thrust herself farther into the limelight in mid-1935 when Der Stürmer published her fawning letter of praise for the publication and its virulent anti-Semitism. In a P.S. she wrote, “If you should happen to find room in your paper for this letter, please print my name in full. I do not want my letter initialled U.M. for everyone should know that I am a Jew-hater.” And everyone soon did know as the English papers reported on the letter. The headline in the Daily Mirror read “Peer’s Daughter as Jew-Hater.”
Decca, overcoming increasing bitterness and friction over her favorite sister’s politics—at one point they nearly came to blows—wrote Unity that she hated what she had written in Der Stürmer but loved her nevertheless. Unity returned the sentiment, in a fashion, two years later, after Decca’s elopement, by writing her that she hated Communists as much as Esmond Romilly hated Nazis and “My attitude to Esmond is as follows—and I rather expect his to me to be the same. I naturally wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him if it was necessary for my cause, and I should expect him to do the same to me. But in the meanwhile, as that isn’t necessary, I don’t see why we shouldn’t be friends, do you.” She also told Decca that Hitler had asked about her and as a favor had suppressed news of Decca’s elopement to Spain in the German press.
While Unity was in Munich in the summer and fall of 1936, often in Diana’s company, hobnobbing with Hitler, his inner circle, and his storm troopers, Esmond Romilly headed off to Spain to fight with the Republican forces defending Madrid as part of the International Brigade. He was one of the few English survivors of a bloody battle near the village of Boadilla del Monte and returned to England after six weeks, suffering from dysentery.
Isolated at home with her leftist ideology, yearning to put it to some use, Decca at one point phoned the Communist Party headquarters in London to ask if they needed any women guerrilla volunteers. She also talked with Esmond Romilly’s brother, Giles, about the possibility of running away to “where the action was,” Spain, which she later said was “a sort of lodestar for people of my generation,” in roughly the same way that the black liberation struggle in the South was for her daughter’s generation several decades later. She was also trying to find a way to meet Esmond, the cousin she’d never met in childhood because of her mother’s dislike for his family. Decca succeeded unexpectedly in January 1937 when she accepted an invitation to spend a weekend at the Marlborough home of Dorothy Allhusen, her own distant relative as well as the cousin and guardian of Esmond Romilly, who Decca subsequently learned was also to be a guest there. (Some accounts imply that Esmond had casually suggested to his guardian that Decca be invited.)
That weekend house party, almost literally on the spur of the moment, began a fairy-tale romance birthed in headlines. Decca said that her “first words” to Romilly were to ask him to take her to Spain with him. He agreed, and over the following days they began plotting secret preparations and inventing a plausible cover story for the escape on which Decca had been intent since the age of eleven. The funds she had accumulated in her “running away account” were critical to the success of the venture. The plot they spun out entailed a series of fictitious letters to Decca’s family, beginning with one to Decca herself from her friends and fellow debutantes “the Paget twins,” Celia and Mamaine, inviting her to visit them in France. Written with Esmond’s help and in Decca’s disguised handwriting, that letter was used to secure her mother’s permission for the trip. When they reached France, Decca kept her mother informed on her “tour with the Pagets” in a series of chatty letters en route to Spain, where they finally arrived after a number of delays and detours to obtain visas. The plan was for Esmond to report on the war for newspapers and for Decca to serve as his secretary.
The “escape” of the young couple was devastating to her family—“the most frightful nightmare,” in Lady Redesdale’s words.
Just days into their adventure, Romilly confessed he had fallen in love with Decca, who expressed her delight and, as she said years later, “that was sort of that.” The young couple (he was eighteen, she nineteen) were exquisitely matched. “The truth is,” their friend Toynbee wrote in a memoir, “that Decca was probably the only member of her class who was suited to be [Esmond’s] wife.”
Thus did Decca join her sisters in international headlines. Their elopement was also amply chronicled in letters between Decca and her mother, as well as in British government cables after Lord Redesdale, armed with a court order, contacted Scotland Yard and the Foreign Office; Winston Churchill got the latter actively involved. Foreign Minister Anthony Eden cabled the consul in Bilbao, Spain: “FIND JESSICA MITFORD AND PERSUADE HER TO RETURN.” Her parents, as Decca put it, “engineered our expulsion,” and the British government pressured the teenage escapees to board a destroyer evacuating refugees that was under orders to fetch them. They jumped ship in France, at Saint Jean de Luz, where they were met by a ravenous British press contingent, and continued to report on the Spanish Civil War from a refugee center in Bayonne, dodging English reporters, often with Keystone Kops melodrama, and defying the pleas of emissaries dispatched by Decca’s family—sister Nancy and her husband, Peter Rodd. (“Jessica Says ‘No’ to Sister’s Plea” read the Daily Express headline.)
Although the couple’s marriage and rebellious adventures during their several years together—first on the Continent, where Romilly wrote his second book, Boadilla, and then in England and the United States—are recounted in the letters and footnotes that follow and in various memoirs and biographies, a few formative experiences should be highlighted here to cover gaps in the letters that survive.
The longest gap is from the summer of 1937 to March 1939, a period from which only a few mundane notes are available. Virtually unmentioned in the letters from this period are details of the Romillys’ return to England late in 1937. They lived a free-spirited existence in Rotherhithe, a working-class neighborhood near the London docks, getting by financially with whatever odd jobs were at hand—and by gambling, ripping off rich acquaintances, and evading bill collectors—while losing no opportunity to do battle with fascists and to bait the social class from which they descended. Decca saw members of her family only occasionally.
Also unmentioned in the available letters from that era was the devastating loss of their first daughter, Julia, who was born in December 1937 and died five months later of measles. The day after Julia’s funeral, the Romillys “ran away to Corsica for three months,” in Decca’s words. Julia’s death was apparently one factor in the next stage of their wandering life, the move to the United States early in 1939. An American friend said that Esmond Romilly brought his wife to the United States “to get her out of the terrible sorrow she was in over the loss of the baby.”
The emigration was motivated, too, by what Esmond Romilly described in a 1939 article as “the atmosphere of grim depression and resignation” in England that spring. He mistrusted the reactionary “machinations of the Cliveden Set” and was not at all certain what side Britain would be on in the looming war. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had signed the “appeasement” agreement with Hitler in Munich months earlier, and the final defeat of the Spanish Republic was imminent. Romilly vowed to return home to help defeat fascism if Britain entered the war against Germany.
Although it’s unclear whether the Romillys were aware of it at the time, or even if the letter was actually mailed, Decca’s mother had written a “Dear Prime Minister” letter to Chamberlain on November II, 1938, saying that Hitler, “whom I know personally,” was “above all a person of heart” who was “most deeply hurt by the way the Munich statement on ‘No more War’ has been … generally received here.” She suggested overtures of friendship between the two countries, beginning with “a social occasion … & a friendly visit” involving Hitler, Prime Minister and Mrs. Chamberlain, and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and his wife.
Political factors certainly entered into their decision, but the immediate precipitants for the couple’s emigration were a process server pursuing them for unpaid utility bills and Decca’s receipt of £100 from a trust fund on her twenty-first birthday—“far and away the biggest sum of money we had ever possessed.” As they later wrote in their Washington Post chronicles, “Suddenly we hit upon the one obvious thing to do with the money. ‘Let’s go to America.’ That was it. The instant we said it we realized what a wonderful plan it was. It solved everything. America was so vast, so exciting, so far away, that the possibilities in the phrase ‘Let’s go to America’ were endless.”
Among the “infinite” possibilities the Romillys imagined for themselves in the New World were striking up a friendship with “an influential businessman” and reaping the financial benefits of the association—or working their way up to the top of the corporate chain starting as secretaries; hitchhiking “starving in the Arizona desert” working as movie extras in Hollywood; “brawling” with other longshoremen and-women in San Francisco taverns; “bums in New York; lions of society in Boston; newshawks in Washington; cowhands in the wild west.” Their plans may not have been fully as fanciful as they portrayed them to the Post’s readers, but they were similarly vague, unrealistic, and open-ended.
