The Pursuit of Laughter (77 page)

‘Are you resident in the United Kingdom?’

‘No. I am resident in France.’

‘How long are you going to stay in this country?’

‘As long as I please.’

‘Yes, but how many days?’

‘That’s my business.’

The customs official, ‘We are only trying to help you.’

Kit: ‘That is most kind, but I don’t need your help.’

If a persistent official seemed disposed to argue, Kit said gaily: ‘Are you detaining me? Because if so you will get a writ tomorrow morning.’ At the magic word ‘writ’ he was waved through.

For twenty-one years we went to Venice every summer, sometimes to a flat, sometimes
to an hotel. We often went to Bayreuth for the Festival, staying at an inn among the woods at Donndorf called Fantaisie. Once we visited Würzburg on the way home. We arrived late, and next morning I asked the hotel porter for a taxi to go and see the Residenz. ‘There’s no point,’ he said. It had been destroyed by bombs. ‘
Alles zerstört
,’ he kept saying angrily, as if I had dropped the bombs myself. He could see we were Anglo-Saxons. However when we got there we discovered that by a miracle the centre block was untouched; the loveliest staircase in the world, with Tiepolo’s frescoes of the Continents, in perfect condition. At the Temple, I copied in miniature the curved hornbeam hedge in the Würzburg Residenz garden.

As the years went by we travelled less, though we still went to England. Kit preferred that I should stay near him, and this I always did. Physically he went gradually downhill, but he was still clever and interested in world events. When he could no longer go for walks in the woods he seemed contented in the garden.

He loved our little Paris flat, and lunching
Chez Pauline
, a delicious restaurant where they made a great fuss of him. He went to sit in the garden of the nearby Palais Royal. He used to say: ‘I tread again the dust of the Palais Royal, soft as the feathers on the wings of sleep.’ Once he reappeared at the flat smothered from head to foot with this whitish dust and looking like a miller. At the end of his life he was apt to fall; thereafter I went with him to the Palais Royal garden. ‘How beautiful it is!’ he would say.

Alexander and Charlotte live in Paris, and their visits to the Temple made him happy. He watched from the window when they left until they were out of sight, and then asked me: ‘Will they come back soon?’ Differences of opinion, such as almost always arise between fathers and sons, had faded into the distant past; he and Alexander and Max, and their wives, Charlotte and Jean, had become his closest friends.

We went for a last visit to the South of France, where he had had so much fun in his youth. We stayed with Max and Jean in a house they had taken; it had a wonderfully good cook. Their boys, aged eight and six, were extraordinarily sensitive to his needs, pulling his chair near the pool, bringing him towels. No wonder he loved them. Of his older
grandsons
the favourites were Rupert Forbes-Adam and Shaun Mosley, but he was interested in all his and my grandchildren.

His son Michael lent him a delightful house in London more than once, and Desmond often invited him to Leixlip; on one occasion there he had a debate in Dublin with the Irish Prime Minister, Mr Lynch. He also stayed at Vivien’s house in Chelsea.

One other sentimental journey into his happy past he made from Osbaston, Jonathan and Sue’s house. They took him to see Cold Overton in Leicestershire, where a beautiful lady had made his hunting life perfect for him. When we drove away he was silent for a long time.

Even when he was very old he was often invited to speak at dinners, or university unions, because his presence ensured a big audience. He did not always accept, but he never entirely gave up. He was asked by an American publisher to write the text for a short
illustrated life of Disraeli, one of his favourite political characters about whom he had accumulated innumerable stories. The idea fell through, a short biography in similar
format
having just appeared. Rather a pity, I thought; Kit’s would have been so much wittier.

Towards the end Jerry Lehane, his driver, lavished loving care upon Kit while Emily Lehane our housekeeper made him all his favourite dishes.

He died, aged eighty-four, as we should all hope to die when the time comes, with no long illness, no hospital or nurses—just one day of restless malaise.

Only a week or two before, Nicholas had come for one of his rare visits; said he would like to write about him and asked if he could have Kit’s papers. Nicholas put on a great show of affection for the occasion; I suppose this was being ‘crafty’. Kit readily agreed. He was supremely indifferent to what people thought about him; he had done his best, during his long life. He often quoted the words of the Lord in the Prologue in Heaven in
Faust: ‘Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen.’
[He who never ceases to strive, we can redeem]. He had striven for more than sixty years, mostly in vain because he had failed to prevent the appalling disaster of the Second World War, but he had left behind ideas which might one day germinate. It goes without saying that he was dearly loved by everyone near to him.

The unrecognizable caricature which Nicholas produced angered Nicholas’s sister and brothers and me, but Kit himself would probably have laughed. He would have deplored the vulgarity and the insensitivity, but been amused by such a classic example of a son
trying
to reduce an extraordinary father to his own level.
The Times
critic summed it up: ‘He has emptied a bucket of mud over his father.’

Although fifty years before, in the passage quoted, Kit had spoken of the ‘scenery of
decadence
’, and although this aptly describes the seediness of London as it now appears to a casual visitor like myself, he never for one moment imagined that his countrymen were themselves decadent. He had unlimited faith in their capacity, intelligence, inventiveness and outstanding qualities of character, courage and endurance. He simply thought they were badly governed, but as it was their choice, it did not worry him unduly. He felt
certain
there would be change with the ebb and flow of history. In his view the present was a transitory phase in the life of a great people. He was never fanatical, always interested to hear another point of view, saying that there were at least two solutions to every problem; the trouble was that neither was ever adopted in time.

There is always, seemingly, a temptation to regard those with whom you disagree about politics as devils incarnate. Kit never took this line. In private life I never knew him get worked up, let alone angry, about politics. He used to say, ‘I am a pro; I will only perform if a large crowd gathers, most of whom have paid for their seats.’ Although this was a joke, there was much truth in it. Perhaps he minded too little what people thought of his ideas. He considered that most of what he regarded as mistakes were due to muddle and
stupidity
, not to wickedness. After watching a party political broadcast on television, his usual
comment was: ‘Silly buggers.’

The complacency of the rich and comfortable is exactly as I remember it in the
thirties
. Some go so far as to say that people prefer living on the dole. A Tory MP was
challenged
to try it himself; at the end of one week he was both hungry and cold.

I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if in 1940 the government, instead of putting Kit in prison, had invited him to perform some specific war work. His own idea, that he should have been told to put on his uniform, join his old regiment, and fight, was out of the question; because of his lame leg he would never have been passed as fit for active service. If, however, traditional English values had prevailed instead of those of a banana republic, Kit would have accepted work offered him and done his best. Then, at the tragic end of the war, he would have had to feel partly responsible for its
disastrous
consequences. He blamed Hitler bitterly, first for his impatience in unleashing war rather than continuing to negotiate, and then for the crimes committed in the course of it. But he did not have to feel any responsibility for this, whereas with regard to crimes committed by the Allies, Osbert Sitwell’s comforting words would not have applied in quite the same absolute way.

At the end of his life he blamed himself for not having made the effort to see Hitler. Might he possibly have been able to influence him? They only met twice in their lives, the second time was three years before the war. Neither spoke the other’s language. However good an interpreter, he is a barrier to conversation and a destroyer of nuance. Also they did not really take to one another, there was no such instant rapport as between Hitler and Lloyd George, for example. I doubt whether more meetings would have made any
difference
; in fact they would probably have been condemned as in some way sinister.

Goethe makes the Lord observe: ‘
Es irrt der Mensch solang er strebt’,
which means more or less that all action entails the making of mistakes. Kit never had the opportunity to show what he could do; we shall therefore never know. If he had got the power he sought, would it have been used for good or evil? Knowing him as I did, admiring and loving him as I do, my own answer is not in doubt.

He tried to change the course of history, and to save the country he loved from what he regarded as a tragic decline. He failed. But Carlyle’s metaphor comes to mind: ‘When the ship returns to harbour with the hull battered and the rigging torn, before we assess the blame of the pilot, before we award the verdict of posterity, let us pause to enquire whether the voyage has been twice round the world or from Ramsgate to the Isle of Dogs.’

It may be considered inappropriate to include a short memoir of Oswald Mosley in a book about friends [
Loved Ones]
. We were married for forty-four years, my knowledge of him and my love for him can obviously not be compared with the affection I bore the other characters I have tried to describe. As I shall never write his biography, which on the
political
 
side has been adequately done by Robert Skidelsky and is certain to be done again, and as his autobiography
My Life
was a highly-praised bestseller when it was published in 1968, all that seems necessary is a short account of the man himself in private life, and perhaps to clear up one or two mysteries.

This is my first proper visit to Paris. Amazing, isn’t it. I always loved it in books but seemed to miss out on those school trips and, when older, found getting into a plane such a hassle that the last thing one wanted to do was come down having just gone up. Actually I did come to Paris once before, with Tony Eliot, proprietor of
Time Out
, to interview Mick Jagger. We flew in at lunchtime, saw Jagger at tea-time, and Tony said ‘If we’re quick we can make the last plane back to London.’ And that was that. The Eurostar rail-link has changed the geography for me entirely. So here I am, on my way to lunch with an Englishwoman who lives not far from my hotel. At first gaze Paris looks like a city of oversauced lumps—but I think I’m going to love it.

Her flat is in the Septième district, the Mayfair of Paris, on a corner overlooking a large garden with grass and trees. There are French windows on two sides and the sunshine makes bright patches on Empire cabinets and comfortable sofas. A tall, slim, upright woman, dressed in beige wool, brown suede shoes, and pearl earrings, is walking towards me with arms outstretched. ‘Have you come all the way from Saint Tropez?’ she asks.

‘No, from London.’

‘You must be so tired.’

‘No, I came on Friday evening.’

‘How clever. What will you have to drink?’

She has a wide smile which seeps upwards into soft blue eyes—and she’s full-on. Can this really be Diana Mosley, 92 this year, once the most beautiful woman in England, then the most amusing, the most notorious, and eventually the most hated? More than 50 years of exile in Paris doesn’t seem to have done her a great deal of harm. Once upon a time everyone knew the outline of her story. But fewer do these days, so here it is again. She began as a Mitford, sister to Nancy, Jessica, Debo, Unity, Pam, Tom. At the age of 18 she married rich Bryan Guinnes and they became a star couple of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Evelyn Waugh described their milieu in his second novel
Vile Bodies
which he
finished
while staying with them in Bryan’s parents’ flat at 12 rue de Poitiers—only a couple
of streets from where we are to-day. Waugh dedicated the novel to them both, ‘with love’, then promptly fell out with Diana and didn’t talk to her again for 25 years.

Notoriety came in the 1930s. She attended the Nuremberg rallies with her sister Unity who introduced her to Hitler. Diana fell in love with the leader of the British Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley (baronet), her adored ‘Kit’. After divorcing a devastated Bryan she set up in Belgravia as a single mother with her two young Guinness sons, Jonathan and Desmond. In 1936 Diana and Unity were the personal guests of Hitler at the Berlin Olympic Games. In the same year Diana secretly married Mosley in Goebbels’s drawing-room in Berlin—Hitler was guest of honour. This was through her friendship with Magda Goebbels who was the first lady of the Third Reich, Hitler being unmarried. Mosley and Hitler didn’t click (this was one of only two occasions they ever met).

Diana had two sons with Mosley: Alexander and Max. At the outbreak of the war Unity shot herself in Munich—she never really recovered and died in 1948. Diana was left as the only person in the world on terms of personal intimacy with both Hitler and Churchill (who had married her father’s cousin). But events had moved beyond her. In 1940 Mosley was arrested and imprisoned. Several weeks later so was she. Diana spent three and a half years of the war in Holloway. What was the effect of all this on her four sons?

‘The two who were at school were called Guinness—so that helped. But Max and Ali, oh I’m
sure
they must’ve suffered.’ Max had been born only 11 weeks before his mother’s imprisonment and the Mosley brothers were cared for by her sister Pam. Subsequently ‘no school would take them, so we got a tutor, and later on Ali went to school in Paris and Max in Germany.’

‘Has their relationship with England been soured?’

‘Certainly not with Max. I think Ali does prefer France. When Max was at school in Germany not long after the war, the school inspector came round and asked each boy a few questions, always including what was your father’s profession. When they came to Max he answered
Faschistenfuhrer
.’ She laughs but adds ‘They were very cross with him—and not unduly.’

There were in addition her three step-children from Mosley’s previous marriage. The eldest is the present Lord Ravensdale, better known as novelist Nicholas Mosley. ‘I’m
furious
with him now. The books he wrote about his father were
so
disloyal.’ Lord Ravensdale of course does not accept that. The two of them long battled over the issue but have now given up trying to speak to each other. It wasn’t always thus.

‘I remember the night Kit was arrested—I rang up Mr Butterwick who was Nicky’s tutor at Eton and I said is he going to be all right? And Mr Butterwick said oh yes, he’s nearly grown up, he’s got his friends, he won’t be bullied. My stepdaughter was all right, she was working in an arms factory. And the third of my step-children, the little one, Michael—one of the aunts wanted to take him to America to get him away from it all. Though Kit was in prison he went to court and said the boy should not go because it was not possible to send all the children out of England and it was quite wrong to show
favouritism and the judge agreed. So Michael stayed and went to private school and when he was at Eton he became Captain of the Oppidans and you can’t get higher than that.’

Though Oswald Mosley had been at Winchester and Diana’s father at Radley, they were part of the grand Etonian world. Mosley’s previous wife Cynthia was the daughter of George Curzon, Viceroy of India, one of the most brilliant figures of the imperial age. Mosley had declined to divorce his wife for his mistress but Cynthia died of appendicitis in 1933 during the initial stage of Mosley’s affair with Diana—whereupon Mosley took up with Cynthia’s sister too! This was Baba who was married to ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, the Duke of Windsor’s oldest friend.

‘Oswald Mosley had an affair with his dead wife’s sister—’

‘With
both
of Cynthia’s sisters I think,’ Diana informs me.

‘This must’ve been very shocking for you.’

‘Well, not really. I think it’s very common.’

‘But you were still young—he was your new love—you surely found it painful.’

‘Only marginally. I think if you’re going to mind infidelity, you better call it a day as far as marriage goes. Because who has
ever
remained faithful? I mean, they don’t. There’s
passion
and that’s it.’

‘You’re obviously not a jealous person.’

‘Not very, no. I might be jealous of a deep friendship, something like that. But not
sexually
jealous. Kit and Baba always had this thing for each other and it’s life. And with sex, opportunity is
so
important.’

‘There’s always plenty of opportunity!’

‘No, there isn’t. Not always.’

‘Did you have any
amours
after Sir Oswald?’

‘Ah, well, like Wilde I can resist anything except temptation—but I was never in the slightest degree tempted.’

Meanwhile lunch has begun, served by the maid at a table at the other end of the
drawing
-room. Diana had said ‘I invited Jean-Noël to join us, I hope you don’t mind, because my hearing is so bad and he can help.’

Which he has been doing, sometimes by shouting what I’ve just asked or by writing it down and passing the note across to Diana. She is decidedly frustrated by having to resort to this—‘Oh, I’m so sorry, it must be so awful for you, you’re so patient’—but it doesn’t happen very often. Jean-Noël is in his thirties with thick black hair which flows upwards. Later on he says ‘Diana is my best friend. I visit her 3 or 4 times a week.’

The first course was tomato and mozarella salad and now we’re tucking into roast
chicken
with vegetables. Well, I am—the other two eat very modestly. There’s a feature I haven’t seen on a private lunch table for many years: finger bowls, in emerald glass. Beneath the table is a smart rug of black and white diamonds.

‘What is your favourite thing in this room?’

‘My clock and barometer.’ She indicates the French gilt pair hanging on the wall
opposite
the windows. ‘They belonged to my great-great-grandfather really—but I bought them at one of my father’s many sales. He was always having to sell things and always at the
bottom
of the market. These came up at Sotheby after the war. They’ve got Paris on the faces so they’ve come home. At the same sale Debo bought his Berlin china which is now at Chatsworth. I’ve just been reading Debo’s wonderful book about Chatsworth. It’s
so
funny. People think that because she’s a duchess she can’t be a writer but she writes so well, the text is so witty, and the pictures are divine.’

All the Mitford girls wrote well. It is curious that despite little formal education they all had a gift for concise observation. This came not simply from proper childhood
instruction
but from their high-spiritedness, their not being afraid to say what they meant, and their lack of pretension. Diana’s own autobiography is as pithy as any.

‘When the first version of my autobiography came out in 1977 I went on television—the Russell Harty Show. When I heard my voice I was horrified. It was
agony
. Jonathan said to Kit “Of course we’ve always known she talked like that but she didn’t realise it herself.” Debo once said to me “Yes, our voices are so awful. But it’s worse for me because they notice it more in the North”.’

The voice is not plummy, is not the Oxford or Bloomsbury drawl, but the perky cut-glass deb voice of the 20s and 30s. It is not remotely awful but very clear, and she has almost flawless grammar besides. No foreigner would have the slightest problem
understanding
her. It was the lighthearted Mitford banter which Evelyn Waugh made into the upper-class flapper slang of his early novels.

‘They’re making a film of
Vile Bodies
,’ I say, ‘directed by a comedian called Stephen Fry. Has he been in touch?’

‘No, he hasn’t. I’ve never heard of him.’

‘What they don’t get so right these days are the voices.’

‘Yes—I took Harold Acton down to Eton where one of my grandchildren was acting in something. He hadn’t been for 50 years—he must’ve been about 70 then—and I asked
him
what’s the big difference, the boys’ long hair? And he said no, no, it’s the accents. For him to say that was very striking because he had this strong sort of Italian accent as you know.’

Cheese—Diana doesn’t take any herself—and green avocado salad are followed by a chocolate flake pudding with lozenges of gold leaf on top. After coffee we decamp to the sofa and I launch out with ‘There’s a new book saying Hitler was homosexual.’

‘I’m sure he was not homosexual—because that sort of thing I do more or less
understand
.’ (Diana has always had gay friends, from Lytton Strachey onwards.) ‘With someone like General Montgomery—it may well have been unconscious—but
all
the ADCs and other people around him were very good-looking young men. And I believe it was the same with Kitchener. Well, now, Hitler’s adjutants were sort of …’

‘Ugly.’

‘
Gnarled
old men, they really were. They were very very sweet but I’m afraid not the
least
bit
good-looking. That just is the answer really, these were the people Hitler loved being with.’

‘It’s widely accepted now that his relationship with Eva Braun wasn’t sexual either.’

‘One can’t be
utterly
sure about anyone—except oneself. But I don’t think sex was a big appetite in him.’

‘Which is strange. Because very powerful men are usually very sexual too. Was he like a eunuch?’

‘Like a eunuch? No, but, well, there was no question of anything between him and me but, you know, one can still feel it, one can still sense it if it’s there, the sexual element—and with Hitler one couldn’t.’

Unity Mitford calculated that between 1935 and 1939 she met Hitler 140 times. She introduced him to the rest of the family. Their mother explained to Hitler the value of wholemeal bread. And how many times did Diana meet him?

‘Not as many as Unity. But ever so many times.’

‘I wish he’d been
something
sexually, he might not’ve murdered so many people. Don’t you think it would have been better for Europe if Hitler had had a sex-life?’

‘Yes, it might’ve been but what about old Musso who had a terrific sex-life?’

‘Exactly. Compared to Hitler he was hopeless at destroying people.’

‘He was made hopeless,’ she replies, ‘because he had a very unsoldierlike population. They didn’t follow him. However he was all for setting everything on fire, wasn’t he.’

‘Is it true that Hitler used to do comic impersonations of Mussolini?’

‘Quite true. Hitler could be very very very funny.’

‘At the end of the war, when the newsreels of the death camps appeared at the cinema, what was your reaction?’

‘Well, of course, horror. Utter horror. Exactly the same probably as your reactions.’

‘Why didn’t you have a revulsion against Hitler because of this?’

‘I had a complete revulsion against the people who did it but I could never efface from my memory the man I had actually experienced before the war. A very complicated feeling. I can’t really relate those two things to each other. I know I’m not supposed to say that but I just have to.’

Diana is one of the people who cuts across our loyalties and preconceptions. Her
disregard
for public opinion is very attractive but it has prevented her rehabilitation. She alone from that time refuses to let us dismiss Hitler as pure evil. Hitler has his human side, she insists. He was one of us. This makes him even more frightening—which may not be what Diana intended.

Personally I can’t stand brutal dictators in any shape or form. She on the other hand is attracted to the idea of ‘the strong man’. And the classic nightmare—the friendly face which turns into a monster—is something she refuses to have. Perhaps at some level there is a conflation between Hitler and her husband. Oswald Mosley used to strut around in a
black costume of his own devising. He was the Errol Flyn of British politics, except of course he wasn’t acting. To reject Hitler would be to reject her husband and that she
cannot
do. This was probably burned into her during those years in Holloway Gaol. Her sister Nancy and Bryan Guinness’s father, Lord Moyne, were among those who advocated her imprisonment.