Nancy Mitford by Selina Hastings

Author:Selina Hastings
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307949479
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-07-02T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

The War

Disappointment over the failure of Pigeon Pie to attract significant notice on publication was quickly submerged in larger events. In the second week of May, Peter was warned for overseas. He had been in Cambridge for training (‘Prepare to laugh. It seems he is to do German local government with a view to becoming a gauleiter when the war is over’), but was now back in Colchester in command of his own company, about to leave for France and in a heroic frame of mind. ‘It is perhaps something to be destined to fight in the biggest battle since the world began,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘I don’t pretend not to be frightened, but duty and destiny are all so clearly defined that it will be easier to take a proper part …’

No sooner had Peter left than the news came that Sir Oswald Mosley had been taken to Brixton Prison under arrest. Nancy’s reaction to this was curious. She had seen nothing of Mosley and not much of her sister Diana since the row over Wigs on the Green four years earlier; but with Nancy, as with all the Mitfords, family feeling ran deep, and she was fonder of Diana than of the others. Perhaps for this reason, Diana’s defection was particularly painful. ‘I am thankful Sir Oswald Quisling has been jugged aren’t you,’ Nancy wrote to Mark, ‘but think it quite useless if Lady Q is still at large.’ And, to make certain that Lady Q got her just deserts, Nancy went to the trouble of going in person to the Home Office where she was interviewed by Gladwyn Jebb, then Principal Private Secretary to the Under-Secretary of State. She told him that in her opinion Diana was as dangerous as her husband, that her frequent visits to Germany1 were sinister and suspicious, and that no time should be lost in putting her under arrest. ‘Not very sisterly behaviour,’ as Nancy uneasily admitted, ‘but in such times I think it one’s duty?’ Nine days after Nancy had given her testimony Diana was indeed arrested2 and committed to Holloway Prison, where she remained for two years on her own before Mosley was given permission to join her in married quarters. Nancy was intrigued, rather than harrowed by her sister’s unpleasant predicament. ‘What can Holloway be like?’ she asked Mrs Hammersley. ‘I would die of the lights out at 5.30 rule wouldn’t you? I suppose she sits & thinks of Adolf.’ To Diana herself, meanwhile, Nancy said nothing of this, but behaved as any affectionate sister would, writing chatty letters, visiting Diana’s children, and keeping her supplied with interesting new books.

Diana may have been the chief offender, but at this period there was no single member of the family on whom Nancy looked with approval. As in childhood at Asthall, it was Nancy versus the rest. Even Debo, recently engaged to Lord Andrew Cavendish, second son of the Duke of Devonshire, ‘has become simply horrid … a very exigeante little creature & dreadfully spoilt’.

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