Decca, p.8
Decca, page 8
55. Hamish St. Clair Erskine was Nancy Mitford’s first love and fiancé. In Esmond Romilly’s allegory, the use of black mercenary troops and the tearing-up of treaties “were a specialty of the Whites.”
56. Many years later Decca wrote, in answer to a query from Charlotte Mosley, editor of a book of her sister Nancy’s letters, “I’m almost sure that Mr. Whitfield was the consul who married Esmond/me. But not totally sure.
57. One of Decca’s nicknames for her sister, derived from their Society of Hens, or Hons. Throughout their lives, Decca and Deborah called each other Hen or Henderson. Decca once gave this arcane explanation: “Hon Henderson comes from a Honnish poem based on two sources: John Anderson my Jo John (Burns) hence Hon Henderson my Ho Hon; and the Lars Porsena of Clusium. Hence: Hon Henderson my Ho Hon / By the nine Gods she swore / That the great house of Henderson / Should suffer wrong no more.”
58. Decca’s mother later mockingly reproved her rebellious daughter in a letter: “I am surprised you fell so low as to go to lunch with a Duchess, I thought your principles would forbid consorting with such.”
59. Lady Redesdale had written to say that Esmond Romilly’s father had also consented to the marriage and the judge had lifted his ban, which she attributed to “my efforts on your behalf.” In the days that followed, Lady Redesdale pushed the couple to return her favor and “arrange to get married now in Bayonne,” adding that “old as I am I cannot agree with the unconventional idea” of the couple living together unmarried and “I could never in a thousand years get used to such an idea.”.
60. Although Lord Redesdale had consented to the marriage, subsequent letters made clear that he was far from happy about it.
61. Lady Redesdale had written to ask the couple to plan an early wedding so she could be present, as she planned to go abroad immediately after the May 12 coronation of King George VI, which the family planned to attend.
62. Captain David John Jones was the master of the tramp steamer Marie Llewellyn, which attempted to run guns—hidden under a cargo of potatoes—to Bilbao in defiance of a blockade declared by the fascists to prevent outside aid for Republican Spain. The captain, subsequently known as “Potato Jones,” was reported at the time, apparently erroneously, to have broken the blockade. He did, however, help to ferry thousands of Spanish refugees to France.
63. Decca’s brother Tom Mitford’s nickname was Tuddemy (sometimes spelled Tudemy or abbreviated as Tud), which Decca wrote in Daughters and Rebels was the Boudledidge translation of Tom.
64. Her mother replied, “I don’t a bit understand about you & Tuddemy, plaintiff & defendant? He didn’t come into it in any way at all!”
65. Esmond has written a lot of his book, 65. Esmond Romilly was in the process of writing Boadilla, his account of the battle at the Spanish village of Boadilla del Monte at which most of his fellow British soldiers were killed.
66. The Mitford children’s beloved nanny, Laura Dicks, who was also known to Decca as M’Honkert (with and without an apostrophe) or, by some accounts, m’Hinket. In their book The House of Mitford: Portrait of a Family (Hutchinson, 1984), Jonathan Guinness, Diana Mitford’s son, and his daughter Catherine Guinness said that Deborah Mitford also used the nickname M’Honkert, which they said was derived from the nanny’s verbal tic, part sniff, part hiccup, part “little asthmatic gasp.”
67. “Scarcely” in Mitford-speak.
68. Lady Redesdale was traveling to Bayonne to attend the couple’s wedding. They were married in the British consulate in Bayonne, attended by both mothers. Decca said Esmond remarked to her that their mothers “looked more like chief mourners at a funeral than wedding guests.”
69. Esmond Romilly had written to Lady Redesdale that he had “heard from two separate sources that thoroughly vile things have been said and believed about me by the Rodds to the effect that I was anxious to get money out of this affair—all the more impertinent because the only reason Rodd could produce for Decca going back to England when we saw him at Saint Jean de Luz was, as he put it, that by doing so D. would get an allowance out of her father!” Lady Redesdale answered that “I pay no attention whatever to what is said & form my opinions from my own observation, which in this case leads me to believe that you have done nothing at all to get money, in fact just the contrary, & I have said this to many people.” She added in a letter to Decca that “Actually I admire this independent spirit very much.”
70. Parents.
71. I am going to have a baby in January (1st to be exact, oh Susan do you remember poor Lottie’s 71. A childhood dog.
72. Ann Farrer was a neophyte actress at the time.
73. In late August, Esmond signed a contract with Hamish Hamilton for publication of Boadilla.
74. Esmond Romilly’s mother.
75. As she often did in this period, Decca seems to have conjoined two words, one French and
76. Probably fingernails.
77. The young couple were touring around France for a few months.
78. Although the derivation of the word is unclear, its usage here suggests that Decca may be referring to her fetus.
79. Decca had been hired to work at the New York World’s Fair by a woman she described in her memoir Daughters and Rebels as “a domineering, fortyish blond.” Her job was as a salesgirl at a Scottish tweed “shoppe” that was part of Ye Merrie England Village.
80. Agnes Meyer, a patron of the arts and education and wife of wealthy investment banker and Washington Post owner Eugene Meyer. The couple had met the Meyers through their nephew, John Cook, a friend of Peter Nevile. Through the conservative Republican Meyers, Decca and Esmond Romilly met their liberal Democratic daughter Katharine Meyer, who had recently returned to Washington at her father’s request to edit the Post’s letters to the editor. They became friendly with Katharine Meyer and her boyfriend and later husband, Philip Graham.
81. Decca’s uncle—her father’s brother—died on August 7, 1939.
82. Unbeknownst to the family or others outside Germany, Unity had shot and seriously wounded herself three days earlier in the English Garden in Munich, shortly after learning of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany. Two days before that, she had written a final letter to her mother asking her to please thank “my Boud”—Decca—“a million times” for birthday gifts she had just received from Decca in New York.
83. Presumably the news of the September 1 German invasion of Poland and the British declaration of war.
84. The Mitfords’ word for “tour.”
85. Decca’s brother, Tom, was in the volunteer Territorial Army, then served in the Rifle Brigade at the beginning of the war.
86. Cousin Dorothy Allhusen, at whose weekend house party Esmond and Decca had met.
87. Newspaper reports on Unity Mitford’s shooting herself.
88. Esmond Romilly had flown to Washington to try to borrow $1,000 to pay for a liquor license and become a partner in the Roma bar.
89. Perhaps short for “creature.”
90. Decca often called her husband “old Boot,” for reasons that are not clear. Her other nicknames for Romilly included old Bird, old Croat, old Thinger, and old Brown.
91. Decca used the word a number of times in letters to Esmond. Since she often referred to herself in letters to Romilly as Slipper, this word appears to mean “Slipper’s bank.” Among the other unexplained names she used to refer to herself was the Man.
92. Esmond’s moneymaking schemes often involved gambling, at which he was notoriously unsuccessful. It was something of a family trait, passed down from his grandmother and his mother, who were both drawn to the casino in Dieppe, where they were “reckless” gamblers, in the words of Nellie Romilly’s sister, Clementine Hozier, later Mrs. Winston Churchill. Decca is reported to have said that her own mother took an instant dislike to Nellie Romilly when, in her newlywed days, “she was accosted by Nellie in Dieppe, who asked her for a loan of £10 to go to the Casino,” a request that Decca’s mother spurned—and also reported to Nellie Romilly’s mother. Decca has written that Esmond would gamble on anything but seemed especially fond in their London days of dog racing, where he was likely to lose their week’s wages, leaving the couple without even bus fare home.
93. This letter was written within days of Unity Mitford’s return to England, where her arrival set off a media tempest, with pursuing crowds of reporters besieging the family almost from the moment their ferry docked, as they had in Calais, where the family spent the night before crossing the Channel. Decca’s letter was mailed to the family’s Old Mill Cottage in High Wycombe (a small house where they had previously stayed when their other homes were rented out but where they lived most of the time after the 1936 sale of Swinbrook House). But after a few days’ recuperation from her draining trip home, Unity Mitford had been taken to Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, where this letter was forwarded by postal authorities. Doctors at the clinic told the family that no further treatment was possible for their brain-damaged daughter.
94. Lady Redesdale had been putting a good face on Unity Mitford’s condition. Decca’s sister remained profoundly disabled for the rest of her life, incontinent, physically awkward, and childlike in intelligence. She died on May 28, 1948.
95. This undated letter appears to have been the enclosure mentioned in one of the two preceding letters to Lady Redesdale.
96. None of Decca’s family members can recall her ever using this word; nor was it used in her childhood home, despite her father’s condescendingly ignorant view of both other social classes and foreigners (he had referred, notoriously, to his niece Joan Farrer’s Argentinian husband as “a black”). Perhaps Decca, new to the country and to the South, had picked up a term that was in general use around her and was not yet aware of its highly charged connotations in the United States, although it is remotely possible she was trying to connect sympathetically with her severely injured Nazi sister. The word was used one other time in her surviving letters, although the context suggests that use may well have been a sarcastic comment on the values of some very proper acquaintances.
97. Sent from the home of Virginia and Clifford Durr. For more background, see the introduction to the next section of letters.
98. Bertram Romilly, Esmond’s father, had died of cancer in May.
99. Giles Romilly, Esmond’s brother, was reporting for the Daily Express when he was captured in Narvik, Norway, on April 9, at the start of the German invasion. He was sent to Colditz, a maximum-security German prison camp, where he was kept under close watch with other VIP prisoners because he was Winston Churchill’s nephew. He remained incarcerated for the rest of the war.
II
AMERICA, IN LOVE AND WAR
At one of her sales jobs in 1939 or 1940, Decca displayed her wares at a dress shop.
With her daughter, Constancia, in October 1941.
Esmond Romilly finally had the signal he was waiting for. Convinced that the turning point had arrived in England and the threat of Nazi appeasement was over, he made inquiries with British and Canadian diplomats in Washington about volunteering in the Royal Canadian Air Force. His other business was to make arrangements for Decca to be well situated during his absence. He turned to his network of friends from previous visits to the capital. The couple felt an attachment to the city. During one earlier visit, Decca had described Washington as “quite a fascinating place, so unlike New York it seems like an eternal Sunday.”
The Romillys’ hosts in Washington, Michael and Belinda (Binnie) Straight, were among their earliest contacts and closest friends there. Like many of their American friends, they were young, smart, well-connected and well-off; they shared English associations and radical politics. Michael Straight’s mother was a Whitney heiress and his father a diplomat and J. P. Morgan and Co. partner who became rich building railroads in China. Michael Straight was educated and met his wife in England, where his mother had settled with her second husband. At a young age, he was a State Department economist and Roosevelt advisor. In 1941 he became editor (and later publisher) of the New Republic magazine, which had been founded by his parents.
Through Michael Straight, the Romillys had met Virginia and Clifford Durr, whose grand old farmhouse on Seminary Hill in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia, was a social center of the New Deal and a hothouse of Southern civil rights activism. The neighborhood was filled with legislators and bureaucrats, journalists, judges, and other Washington insiders. The Durrs, both native Alabamans, were ardent Roosevelt Democrats. Clifford had been a Rhodes Scholar. Virginia was descended from slave-owning Confederate aristocrats. They became passionate civil libertarians during their years in Washington, where they had been enticed in 1933 by Senator (later Supreme Court Justice) Hugo Black, Virginia Durr’s brother-in-law. Clifford Durr served as counsel for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, as a behind-the-scenes administration advisor on Southern poverty and race issues, and, later, as a member of the Federal Communications Commission. Virginia Durr devoted her years in Washington primarily to the welfare of blacks and working-class whites in the South, to the campaign against the poll tax, and to the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. (The Durrs returned to Alabama in the early 1950s, where they played a central role in the emerging civil rights movement.)
As Virginia Durr recalled it, Esmond Romilly asked her if Decca could stay with them “over the weekend” while he went north to volunteer. Durr said no because she was going to the Democratic National Convention, but Romilly replied, “Oh do let her go with you.” He said that Decca would be very lonely and the convention would be a diverting experience for her. Durr knew Decca at the time only as Romilly’s “exquisitely beautiful” wife. When she’d seen them together, Decca “never said anything,” Durr recalled. “Esmond did all the talking. He was such a great talker and completely dominated any situation he was in … so fascinating and so interesting.” The two were “as one,” Durr recalled, but “Esmond was the one.” She agreed to put up the young woman briefly and take her to the convention. Neither could have guessed it at the time, but Decca remained at the Durrs’ for the next two years, becoming a member of the family and a lifelong friend.
Virginia Durr could also not have imagined the inconvenience of taking Decca to the convention in Chicago. Decca was suffering from morning sickness. She “threw up all the way from Washington to Chicago—it seemed to me at every filling station.” That was how Durr learned of her pregnancy, which Decca hadn’t disclosed previously. They were given access to the convention floor by Durr’s Texas New Deal friends, including freshman Representative (and, decades later, President) Lyndon Johnson and Undersecretary of the Interior Alvin Wirtz, who made them members of the Texas delegation. The young Englishwoman and her Alabaman hostess were given delegates’ credentials, large straw sombreros, and lariats. “We had the greatest time you can imagine,” Durr wrote.
In the sweltering convention hall, they were seated “ioo miles from the ladies’ room,” said Durr, who wrote in her autobiography that she told one of the Texas delegates, “I’ve got a young English girl with me who throws up all the time. What in the name of God are we going to do?”; She said the delegate, wearing a fine felt sombrero, “went over and swept off his hat like Sir Walter Raleigh and said to Decca, ‘Madame, use my hat if you need it.’ …Fortunately, she didn’t throw up in his hat, but she kept it in her lap the whole time.” The Texans likened Decca’s ornery fetus to the Democrats’ mascot donkey “kicking up its heels”—a small donkey, or dinky donkey. The nickname stuck, in various permutations, and the Romillys’ daughter Constancia is still known to friends as Dinky.
After the convention, Decca had planned to seek work in New York, but she was still suffering when they got back to stifling-hot Washington. Virginia Durr, who had become “very devoted” to her, asked her to stay with them until the expected arrival of an Oxford University librarian’s wife seeking refuge with her child from Hitler’s threatened air raids. When that guest decided to take her chances in England rather than risk encountering a German submarine en route to the United States, Decca said to Virginia Durr, “Well, if you want a British refugee, you’ve got one.” She stayed on, paying her way with an RCAF dependent’s allowance, a portion of her husband’s salary, and a succession of jobs. By then she was so well connected that, shortly after her return from Chicago, her job search was reported in the Washington Post, courtesy of the Romillys’ friend, publisher Eugene Meyer. Decades later, Decca described the two years she remained at the Durr home as “a marvelous introduction to contemporary American history and thought…. I was the lucky fly-on-the-wall, afforded a rare opportunity for an unforgettable education, which served me well in my future life.”
As Decca became established in Washington as a career woman, student, and mother with a growing circle of influential friends, she was in only sporadic contact with her English family. She was deeply suspicious of their fascism, as, indeed, were the British government and public. The memory was still fresh of Unity Mitford’s return on a stretcher early in 1940, when she was said to have told one of the clamoring reporters, “I’m very glad to be in England, even if I’m not on your side.” A couple of months later, Lord Redesdale felt compelled to write to The Times of London that he wasn’t a fascist and had never been one. Lady Redesdale never made any secret of her Nazi sympathies. Diana Mosley was called “extremely dangerous and sinister” by the head of the MI5 intelligence agency, and within days of the time Esmond Romilly headed to Canada to enlist, she was imprisoned for her pro-Nazi activities; her husband had been interned a month earlier.
The Romillys were living apart for the first time in their brief married life. They had periodic phone conversations and visits during Esmond’s year of training in Canada, but mostly they communicated in often daily letters, which both of them treasured. (When Decca sold her personal papers to Ohio State University’s archive decades later, she had one reservation: she wouldn’t relinquish the wartime correspondence with her first husband until photocopies were made for her to keep.)
