The Pursuit of Laughter (74 page)

Kit could not bear to waste even a day of his life in such a way. He gave himself a
programme
of reading, and he learnt the only thing available to be learnt at Brixton: languages. He greatly improved his French, and he studied German—there were numerous Germans in the prison. It was a triumph of the will that by the time he joined me in Holloway eighteen months later he knew enough German to be able to read and enjoy Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, Hölderlin and other poets. Just as in English, after a few
readings
he knew his favourite passages by heart, and could quote extensively from
Faust, Wallenstein, Also Sprach Zarathustra
, and other works of genius. He had learnt in what for him were inauspicious circumstances; he who loved solitude was constantly in a noisy crowd, and there was a ping pong table outside his cell. He welcomed the hours locked in his cell, there was silence and he was alone.

In Brixton he was visited by a few old political friends: James Maxton, the Independent Labour Party leader, went down, and so did Bob Boothby, and Walter Monckton who was in the government. Harold Nicolson also went to the prison; he was working in the
propaganda
department of the Ministry of Information. The evening before his visit Kit had happened to hear him broadcast a talk, which was so silly and so dishonest that he refused to receive him. Nicolson shared a flat with Guy Burgess, the Communist spy who probably influenced him.

Kit’s first mention of phlebitis came in spring 1941. By then we were allowed to see each other once a fortnight.

‘Until we were well.’ I was fairly well, but he already was not. Naturally ‘the sunlit road’ could only be a dream for the future after the war, but a year later we were together, though still in prison. On a hot day we were sitting in our yard with our backs to the grimy wall when the Catholic priest, Canon Browne, came to see us. He went on to visit the 18B women in their part of the prison, and one of them told me later that he had said: ‘It’s like the Garden of Eden over there.’ The asphalt path, the stony, sooty patch of soil, the walls and the bars, made a strange Garden of Eden. Nevertheless there was a certain truth in the old priest’s vision. The kingdom of heaven is within. Just as Kit’s letters had been my solace, so his presence was my joy.

This welcome improvement in our situation had come about because in the late autumn of 1941 my brother Tom, dining at Downing Street, had been questioned by Churchill and told him that, for us, the worst of the deprivations of our imprisonment was the fact that we were separated. The Prime Minister, who disliked the suspension of habeas corpus, acted quickly and we were locked up together.

We had been married five years when the little cage at Holloway became our dwelling. We were there for two more years; nothing changed except the seasons; for ten months out of twelve the old prison was cold. We who had led such varied, active lives, who, even when Kit was at his busiest, had always escaped for a few days now and again to Paris, or Arles, who had been fortunate enough to live surrounded by beauty, and friends, were now deprived of everything except one another and our books. We were transported from our grim surroundings by plays and poetry. Far from wasting these seemingly endless years I believe Kit’s whole view of life was dramatically influenced by, in particular, Goethe’s philosophy and his Hellenism, as well as his pantheism.

He knew no Greek, but in various translations he read Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Greek drama, Greek philosophy, every book he could get in English or German on Hellenism, were his staple diet in prison. He read Corneille and Racine. All these were for pleasure; for work he read Freud, Jung and Adler.

I suppose it was a test of marriage, but such an unusual one that it is hard to guess how other marriages would have fared in like circumstances. Kit was a superb companion, amused, amusing, appreciative of the smallest pleasures, laughing at the absurdities which abound in all institutions, brilliant, loving, even-tempered and unselfish. The contrast with our normal lives was complete, and it was due to him that we never subsequently looked back upon our three and a half years in the miserable prison as wasted years. At Wootton we had been largely insulated from the world in a sort of paradise, but only for short
periods
.
Now we were insulated in a sort of purgatory, but the essential ingredient was the same in both: we had each other.

Infinitely worse for me than the drear and squalid discomfort of prison was being parted from my four children. Max, the youngest, was a few weeks old, and his brother Alexander nineteen months when I was taken away from them. I missed the years when, as Mrs Hammersley once put it, they were at the zenith of their sweetness. The older boys, too, were changing, and perhaps missing me as I missed them. They were undergoing what for so many English boys is the most hateful part of their childhood, the years at a preparatory school.

In our block of Holloway there was another couple. Major and Mrs de Lassoe. They were in their sixties, tactful and unobtrusive. He used to fetch our weekly rations from the prison store, and one day he called me to look at the dust and grime mantling the dried beans and peas.

‘Disgracefully dirty,’ he said.

‘Oh well, Major de Lassoe, isn’t one supposed to eat a peck of dirt a year?’ I asked.

‘
No
Lady Mosley. A peck of dirt in a
lifetime
,’ he said angrily.

The all-pervading dirt in the prison was a surprise to me, as the wardresses dispose of an abundance of slave labour and I had wrongly imagined a hospital-like cleanliness.

In ordinary life Kit was always well, even elegantly dressed, but in prison he wore his oldest and shabbiest country clothes until they were frayed and out at elbow. I think his down-at-heel appearance rather annoyed the governor, a Dr Mathieson, but Kit
considered
he was suitably dressed for his environment. Once when the governor came to fetch him for some special reason, perhaps a conference with counsel, I walked with them to the gate of our yard. Kit was wearing a degraded old overcoat; two buttons were missing and a third hanging by a thread.

I said: ‘Your coat! It’s a disgrace!’ and turning to the governor, ‘I ask you to look at his
buttons!’

The governor gave me a hostile glance and said primly, ‘Most people would say it was the wife’s job to sew on her husband’s buttons.’ ‘Heavens, that would
never
do,’ I said. ‘Apparently only tailors know how to sew them on. He would never let
me
touch his clothes.’

The governor was silent. Kit smiled. He knew the governor and I disliked one
another
.

Near our gate there was a sinister little mortuary, usually kept locked but occasionally scrubbed out by a convict. One old wardress disliked passing it alone at dusk; she had been fond of Mrs Thompson who was found guilty as accessory before the fact when her lover, Bywaters, was convicted of the murder of Mr Thompson; she was hanged at Holloway. Even twenty years later the mortuary reminded Miss Davis of horrors. Kit knew this, and always said, ‘Shall I come with you to the gate?’ and they walked down the path together. Then out came her bunch of keys, she unlocked the gate and as she locked it behind her,
said gratefully, ‘Good night, Sir Oswald.’ It was hard to know who was guarding whom.

One day two men appeared with paint and brushes and went into the primitive grimy bathroom. I could hardly believe my eyes. Although it badly needed painting it would have been an event so unlikely as to be incredible that the prison should be in any way cleaned or smartened up. They took out a tape measure and exactly five inches from the bottom of the bath they painted a thick green line on the chipped enamel. Apparently King George VI had had an idea about saving water: he considered five inches was plenty to bath in. I never quite understood the point; we have such a nice rainfall in England and water is not a commodity which has to be imported. The green line was called King George’s Line; I suppose we shall never know how many people had shallow baths, and how many disloyally wallowed. It probably did save water. According to my father, his sister, my aunt Iris, for whom a hint from the King was the equivalent of a command from the Trinity, said her breakfast coffee was to be made from the water in her hot water
bottle
. Many people got a perverse pleasure from any form of rationing.

Kit finally became seriously ill for want of air and exercise. Walking round and round our little yard beneath the enormous wall was not enough. Despite his lame leg he had fenced twice a week whenever possible: public schools fencing champion at the age of
fifteen
, he was a member of the English fencing team and seemed to need the exercise. Phlebitis, to which he had always been prone, became a real danger. He lost four stone in weight, and at last even the Home Office doctors insisted upon his release, in November 1943.

Until the end of the war we lived under house arrest, with a policeman nearby. The Home Office moved us from our first stop, where Pam and Derek Jackson had hospitably received us, and we finally found a nice old house at Crux Easton in Berkshire. As Kit’s health gradually improved, when summer came we got bicycles and flew round the
countryside
on them. From a bicycle one can see many things hidden from a motorist, people’s gardens in villages, over hedges and across fields. Tom, back from North Africa, came often when he was on leave; he said he wished he could stay a year, reading. A van had brought our extensive prison library from Holloway in addition to our other books.

Best of all, I was reunited with my four children. Kit loved the two little boys, now aged five and nearly four. He invented endless rhymes and songs for them. He decided to farm in order to feed his large family, and as there was no land at Crux Easton he bought Crowood, unseen, as the Home Office with its customary spite refused us permission to go the few miles necessary to look at it. Seven miles was our limit.

Just forty years later an old friend, Robert Swann, whom we had meantime quite lost sight of, offered to add his memories of those days to mine. He wrote:

He goes on: