Take Six Girls by Thompson Laura

Author:Thompson, Laura [Thompson, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus

II

Had Unity returned to Britain hale and hearty, she might have been imprisoned under the Emergency Defence Regulations. Whether anything worse would have happened to her, it is impossible to know. The usual charges against her – that she was a friend of Hitler, an admirer of the Third Reich – did not equate to traitorous activity. But Herbert Morrison had flung out the accusation that she had assisted the enemy. Doubtless there were many who did believe that she had been some kind of agent for the Nazis. What would one have thought, as a member of the public back in 1940? Probably just that.

How much truth there would have been to such a perception is difficult to say; and this nuance, this need to draw a line between pro-Nazi sympathies and unpatriotic sentiment, between those who wanted peace with Germany and those who supported German aims, would become a peculiarly vexed, quasi-philosophical point. Of course it was not really a good time for arguing subtleties of this kind. War was not High Table. And it was quite natural, to see present guilt within past allegiances. Whether it was justice, to condemn outright those whose behaviour had formerly been legal, if distasteful, and now looked suddenly dangerous, is another question. But such was war. The enemy was also anybody who had ever supported the enemy.

Well: Unity had certainly done that, and in her sui generis position she had also been a potential conduit for information, from Germany to England and the other way about. In 1937, for instance, she had nonchalantly told the British ambassador that Hitler did not like Mussolini. And Hitler had remarked, in a recorded conversation, that the Mitford sisters ‘are very much in the know, thanks to their relationship with influential people’. He had then said something else: that on one occasion, in 1939, Unity had ‘exclaimed that in the whole of London there were only three anti-aircraft guns!’ Diana, who was present at the time, was described by Hitler as staring at Unity ‘stonily’. She was used to her sister’s loose-cannon behaviour, but this was something rather more. Later, Diana was at pains to make clear that Unity was probably repeating newspaper gossip; that she was in no position to hold such lethal information in 1939. Nevertheless what Unity said teetered dangerously close to treason. Britain was ill prepared for war. The fact that Germany would have known that anyway was hardly the point. Perhaps it was simply the old desire to tell Hitler things that would please, with no thought to what they might really mean. Unity, in Diana’s words, ‘was incapable of disloyalty to England’.7

In April 1941, however, the Commons was again contesting this assertion. Unity had been seen in public that month at Deborah’s wedding to Lord Andrew Cavendish, at St Bartholomew’s church in Smithfield. Some families might have thought it politic not to have her there, but the Mitfords (and the Devonshires) were not the kind to be influenced by what ‘people’ might say.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.