In May 1940 the German armies moved west. On 9 May Kit published a statement in his weekly paper, Action: According to the Press, stories concerning the invasion of Britain are being circulated ... in such an event every member of British Union would be at the disposal of the nation. Every one of us would resist the foreign invader with all that is in us. However rotten the existing government, and however much we detested its policies, we would throw ourselves into the effort of a united nation until the foreigner was driven from our soil. In such a situation no doubt exists concerning the attitude of British Union.
The phoney war was now at an end. Kit was arrested on the 23 May, a fortnight after his belligerent statement was published. At the time of the fall of France and the escape of our armies from Dunkirk, he was in gaol. It was then that many politicians began to talk of a negotiated peace.
I have described our prison experiences in my memoirs and shall not repeat here. In June 1940, a month after his arrest, Kit was told that his sister-in-law, Lady Ravensdale, intended to apply to the court for the guardianship of his three elder children. He insisted upon going to oppose this move in person. He had a 'special relationship' with both Cimmie's sisters, but despite — or perhaps because of- this he would not have considered either a suitable guardian, and he knew how strongly Cimmie would have objected to the idea. He felt quite certain he would shortly be released from prison, having already been heard at great length by the 18B Advisory Committee. Had he known that he was to be locked up for three and a half more years he might hardly have opposed Irene Ravensdale's guardianship so violently, as she was obviously de facto the children's guardian. He did his best to veto a plan to send Michael, aged eight, to Canada, and in this the judge agreed with him. But with regard to Irene he was over-ruled. His letter to me describing all this and asking me to write to Nicholas inviting him to stay when he should be back in a house of his own, and also to thank Nicholas's housemaster Mr Butter-wick for their pleasant relationship and tell him henceforward to send all communications to Lady Ravensdale, was sent to Denham, and forwarded to Holloway Prison, as I had meantime been arrested myself. I was therefore unable to deliver his messages.
In the long run this guardianship question made little difference; as usual heredity took over from environment to a great extent. But Kit was extraordinarily incensed by it. He had tried so hard to be a good father, a role which did not come easily to him, and he had succeeded. Irene's action seemed to him as unnecessary as it was insulting. Although they were both minors in law, Vivien and Nicholas were grown up; nineteen and seventeen. I was surprised that they did not object, or at least go and see their father to discover what he felt about Irene's move. When I asked them years later, it transpired they had no idea he minded; their aunt with an odd lack of candour had never told them that Kit had insisted upon going from prison to the court in order to oppose it in person.
However, his annoyance was soon forgotten in his frantic worry about me. He was powerless to help, and his feelings can easily be imagined. He knew from his own experience the degradation and filth of prison. I was nursing my baby, eleven weeks old, and he imagined me getting every sort of infection and fever. His letters enjoined me to get hold of Mr Gilliatt, the gynaecologist, without delay — an impossibility. I could riot take the baby; France had fallen and bombs were expected to fall on London any day. Denham had been requisitioned by the army and the babies and I had been going to my sister in Oxfordshire on the Monday, but on Saturday I was taken off to prison. After a few days of miserable pain, I recovered.
Henceforward Kit's attitude to his elder children changed. He was fond of them, they were always welcome, but he felt no more responsibility for them; they had been taken from him against his forcibly expressed will. Nicholas stayed on at school as long as possible until he was called up. By then Kit and I were imprisoned together in Holloway. It was inexpressibly bitter for him to think that his son might be killed in the war, and die before he had begun to live, as had so many of his own contemporaries in the First World War. We got permission for Nicholas to come for longer visits to the prison. Kit felt deepest compassion for him, and tried in conversation and in letters to show affection, and to interest him in books and ideas which filled his own mind at that time. My sons Jonathan arid Desmond were allowed similarly long visits, and so were the two babies, during this fourth year of our incarceration.
It is probably quite difficult for someone who has not experienced it to imagine how demoralizing it is to be imprisoned without trial. It is like being kidnapped — you cannot see the end. If you are charged, and there is a trial, either you are found not guilty and released at once, or you are sentenced, and can count the days of vileness. No charge, no trial. No trial, no sentence. After Kit's appearance and interrogation by Birkett's Advisory Committee he felt completely certain he would be released; his letters to me show this. Instead, I was arrested myself. Nevertheless hope never quite faded. It revived when occasionally the question of Regulation 18B was raised in the House of Commons, or when Churchill had the decency to say there had never been a fifth column in England. Also, people were released from time to time, for no apparent reason, just as they had been arrested for no apparent reason in the first place. This constant uncertainty, added to rumours flying round the prison about being transferred to a concentration camp, or another prison, made nearly everyone live from day to day, doing nothing because nothing seemed worth doing or beginning.
Kit could not bear to waste even a day of his life in such a way. Pie 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, Holderlin and other poets. Just as in English, after a few readings he knew his favourite passages by heart, and could quote extensively from Faust, Walleristein, 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 Morickton 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. Only four days more till I see my Darlingest one (he wrote]. Everything is so dull in the interval. How I long, more and more if possible, to be with you, now that the lovely Spring and Summer is on the way. I think of you so much ... It would be so wonderful to be with you . . . All our time together I have always had so much too much to do. But all the same we had so much Heaven. My phlebitis so far does not appear to have spread. I expect it is bound to appear in other places as it always does once it starts. But that is nothing to worry about as I can always get the specialist to bind it up before it goes much higher up the leg ... In general I am feeling better than I was and longing for it to be less cold so as to get a little sun — the reviver. It has a magical quality. Oh to go together on a sunlit road towards its ever gathering power until we were well and had forgotten. Anyhow to be with you anywhere in the Summer would be a Paradise.
'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 194I 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 Aries, 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 cat 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 live 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 aunl Iris, lor 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 arid 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 1945.
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 Pain 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; lie 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: I first came to know Kit and Diana because Jonathan Guinness, Diana's son by her first marriage, was my 'best friend' at Eton. We were both tugs [King's Scholars] though singularly unimbued with the College spirit, a rather high-minded version of traditional Etonian values. My first visit to the Mosleys took place at Crux Easton where they were closely restricted in their movements; subsequently on several occasions at Crowood after the war. Like many other boys of my age I liked to think of myself as grown up and sophisticated but I must admit to wondering with a touch of trepidation what the 'notorious' Mosleys would be like.
He goes on: Diana's laughter swooped onto every plan one made, every subject one discussed, but I suppose the biggest surprise was really Kit. I don't quite know what I had imagined - not, anyhow, someone so 'normal'. Photographs in the Press when the Mosleys were released had selected a Blackshirt leader image, very different from Mosley in his own home talking to Jonathan and Jonathan's friends about books, history, school gossip (he particularly enjoyed our slightly teasing portraits of the Eton beaks).
He was tremendously easy to talk to because he was never condescending: I noticed exactly the same thing when he talked to farm labourers. He might occasionally talk over our heads about philosophy but even that was flattering as it assumed we were frightfully well-read. He also had the marvellous gift (surely a little bit deliberately cultivated?) that I also remember in Maurice Bowra of taking some fairly banal remark one had made as if it were almost a revelation, embroidering on it and transforming it just enough so that one seemed to have said something dazzlingly intelligent.
Kit was totally unembittered. The only reference to prison life I remember is that one of the cows was named after a particularly pleasant, or, more likely, unpleasant prison wardress. This, I seem to recollect, delighted Alexander who also had a rich collection of swear-words and a strong local accent. Kit loved to get him to talk in Wiltshire with as many of the forbidden words as possible.
He was not a very demonstrative father, though he loved to see Ali and Max doing something a little bit wild. Perhaps because he didn't constantly dote they obviously loved his approval. On one occasion, when rny mother was staying, Diana and she organized charades in the version where people choose whom they want to portray; Ali wanted to be God, Max his (not His) father.
Kit spent a lot of time reading, walking or on the farm. Meals — delicious by war-time and immediately post-war standards — were a time of great relaxation. He loved fun and jokes, though one sensed that he had a relatively low boredom-threshold. Diana orchestrated everything so that he should be happy and there were obviously lots of semi-private, but never mawkish, jokes between them.
I never saw him angry though I'm pretty sure he could have been terrifying, and just once or twice there was a faint suggestion that it might be a good idea if people didn't make too much noise while Kit was reading.
As I got to like Kit I began to think I ought to tell him that my politics were (and are!) pale and pink, pansy Liberal. This I did — somewhat pompously, I'm afraid -and though he must have been laughing inside he had the tact to pretend to take it all very seriously. On my side I remember being impressed that he had had as political as well as personal friends many of the writers I most admired, like Osbert Sitwell and Christopher Hobhouse.
For someone so original he was rather conventional, though one of my friends told me that Kit once said to him, almost wistfully, that he so liked to try almost anything once that he rather regretted he'd never had the least homosexual urge! I must say I can't see him very convincingly in that particular role.
It was some considerable time later, in 1947 or early 1948, that he reappeared in politics in public. Jonathan and I were doing our National Service and dressed as two conspicuously unmilitary Privates escorted Diana to one of his first meetings which the Jewish '43'* tried to break up violently. Kit had some fairly dotty idea that we might discourage aggressors from Diana, who, typically, had insisted on being there. I can't imagine J and I would have deterred anyone. I did get a glimpse then - and on one other occasion — of his extraordinary oratory. If I had to find one adjective for him it woidd be a curious one — gallant.
This account of our family life from 1944 to 1948 by someone who was fourteen when he first met Kit evokes those years, the little boys' accents and Kit teasing them. We used to have tea in the nursery; Alexander came in one day saying he had had a fight with a boy from the village.
'Heavens,' I said, 'he's twice your size.'
'Oh, that didn't matter. You see I looked at him and hypnotised him.'
Kit immediately began to sing:
Big Oyes, you hyptonoise me Huge oyes, you hyptonoise Great velvet oyes you hyptonoise me Enormous oyes - it is your soize.
'Silly,' said Alexander.
Robert Swarm mentions Osbert Sitwell, who wrote to Kit on 15 April 1945: 'Yes, the inadequacy of time is appalling; and to have been unjustly deprived, as you have been, of a period of time, is beyond bearing. The only comfort for you must be that it is impossible to blame YOU for anything that happened in those years.'
Diana Mosley - Loved Ones - Part 4
|
