A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley Read online

  ‘Beautifully written.’

  Valerie Grove, The Times

  ‘Martini-dry wit.’

  Irish Times

  ‘Often pure Wodehouse.’

  Financial Times

  ‘Uncompromising.’

  A.N. Wilson, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘It has all her charm.’

  Laura Thompson, A Good Read, BBC Radio 4

  ‘Brilliant.’

  Evening Standard

  ‘A Life of Contrasts is a candid, page-turning memoir, written by a woman who will—without any doubt—be viewed by history as one of the most fascinating personalities of the Twentieth Century.’

  Mary S. Lovell

  ‘Lady Mosley writes extremely well… Her book reads like brilliant talk; her characters live and die in a single phrase… An autobiography of real distinction.’

  Jonathan Raban, Sunday Times

  ‘I envy any reader coming for the first time to A Life of Contrasts, Diana Mosley’s account of her own eventful past, for he has a rare treat in front of him.’

  Selina Hastings

  ‘Sharp, amusing and well-written.’

  Hugh Thomas, New Statesman

  ‘Wholly if grittily, a Mitford book… the reader will be flung between delight and dismay as he reads on… To all those not averse to a little powdered glass in their Bombe Surprise: enjoy.’

  The Times

  ‘Other members of the Mitford family do not have the monopoly of brilliant and amusing writing.’

  The Tatler

  ‘She emerges among all else as feminine…’

  Mary Warnock, The Listener

  ‘Animated and revealing.’

  Hibernia

  ‘Witty and amusing.’

  Catholic Herald

  ‘She was clearly a star.’

  Anne de Courcy in The Viceroy’s Daughters

  A LIFE OF CONTRASTS

  THE

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  OF

  Diana Mosley

  GIBSON SQUARE

  London

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Foreword, Selina Hastings

  1. GRANDFATHERS AND GRANDMOTHERS

  2. ‘… SHE CAN’T LIVE LONG’

  3. BATSFORD

  4. ASTHALL

  5. PARIS

  6. SWINBROOK

  7. BAILIFFSCOURT

  8. BUCKINGHAM STREET

  9. CHEYNE WALK

  10. MOSLEY

  11. MUNICH AND ROME

  12. HITLER

  13. ACCIDENT

  14. WOOTTON

  15. BERLIN

  16. WAR

  17. PRISON

  18. CRUX EASTON

  19. CROWOOD

  20. ALIANORA

  21. LE TEMPLE DE LA GLOIRE

  22. CLONFERT

  23 VENICE AND PARIS

  24. INCH KENNETH AND LONDON

  25. THE WINDSORS

  26. THE ANTAGONISTS

  27. THE VALE OF TEARS

  28. LAUGHTER AND THE LOVE OF FRIENDS

  29. SORROWS

  30. A FEW WEEKS IN ENGLAND

  31. FLASHBACK

  32. FRIENDS

  33. EXTREME OLD AGE

  Endnotes

  About the Author

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  I first met Diana Mosley when in 1980 I was sent by a newspaper to interview her about her book on the Duchess of Windsor. Her husband, Sir Oswald, was alive then, and the Mosleys were living in their ravishing early 19th-century house, Le Temple de la Gloire, just outside Paris. For me it was a memorable encounter, and I was bowled over by this extraordinary woman, not only by the celebrated beauty, formidable intelligence and blazing instinct for the truth, but by the fact that during the three or four hours we spent together she made me laugh almost more than I had ever done.

  Diana was then in her sixties, but her exceptional qualities were apparent from an early age. In 1929, when she was just 19, Evelyn Waugh wrote to the novelist Henry Green, ‘Do you and Dig share my admiration for Diana? She seems to me the one encouraging figure in this generation.’ At that period it was Diana of all the six remarkable Mitford sisters who was most prominently in the public eye, her elder sister Nancy not yet having written the novels which made her name, her younger sisters, Unity, Decca and Debo, still enclosed in the schoolroom. At 18 Diana had married Bryan Guinness, a gentle, literary young man of romantic good looks and an immense fortune, and it was through this marriage that Diana was released into the world to which she ardently aspired, that of the literary and artistic intelligentsia.

  Young Mrs Guinness with her loveliness, her wit and her engaging enthusiasm, made friends everywhere, and not only among her youthful contemporaries: Lytton Strachey adored her, as did Augustus John, Gerald Berners and Osbert Sitwell. With Bryan’s riches at her disposal, Diana filled their country house, Biddesden in Wiltshire, with paintings by artists both new and established, commissioned a carpet from the modernist Marion Dorn, and sculpture from Stephen Tomlin. Dora Carrington painted a trompe l’oeil and Boris Anrep executed a mosaic for the swimming-pool. (Anrep’s mosaic portrait of Diana, as one of the nine Muses, still adorns the entrance of the National Gallery in London.)

  At Biddesden, in London, and at the Guinnesses’ house in Ireland, Bryan and Diana entertained and with panache, among the most regular beneficiaries of their lavish hospitality the Sitwells, Henry and Pansy Lamb, Henry Yorke (Henry Green), Robert Byron, Harold and William Acton, John Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh. Betjeman wrote a poem beginning, ‘I too could be arty, I too could get on/ With Sickert, the Guinnesses, Gertler and John’, while Waugh dedicated two books to Bryan and Diana Guinness and used Diana as a model for Lucy Simmonds, the heroine of Work Suspended. To Lucy Simmonds is attributed generosity, an unaffected goodness and sincerity, and a pale beauty which ‘rang through the room like a peal of bells.’

  To Diana the most revered member of the older generation was Lytton Strachey—nicknamed ‘Mr Oh-Indeed’, as those were the words with which he most frequently punctuated his conversation. It was Strachey who became her mentor, directing her reading and doing a great deal to fill in the gaps left by a somewhat patchy education. She loved him not only for his wisdom and originality but for his unerring ability to ‘see the comic side’, as she puts it, a virtue prized almost above all others in Mitford eyes. For as a family Diana and her sisters regard it as an essential politeness to present life, wherever possible, as delightful and amusing, and thus seeing the comic side constitutes a basic requirement of this courteous philosophy.

  Wit and humour are notoriously difficult to convey in retrospect, especially here without the advantage of the Mitford drawl and familiarity with the Mitford habit of oblique approach. (An example of this unconventional perspective occured when in 1981 I visited Diana in hospital in London where she was recovering from a life-threatening operation. Laying aside my proffered copies of Tatler and Vogue, she asked me instead to bring her from the London Library two dusty tomes in German Schrift of the life of the Kaiser. ‘How could you bear to wade through such boring stuff?’ I asked her. ‘Oh, darling,’ came the reply, ‘the jokes!’) But if regrettably I am unable to remember exactly what was said, I know that I came away enchanted from that first meeting nearly a quarter of a century ago, and the warm and stimulating friendship that developed remains one of the delights of my life.

  I envy any reader coming for the first time to A Life of Contrasts, Diana’s own account of her eventful past, for he has a rare treat in front of him.

  Selina Hastings

  1.
r />   GRANDFATHERS AND GRANDMOTHERS

  Neither of my grandfathers had a conventional Victorian family upbringing. Algernon Bertram Mitford, youngest of three sons, was born in 1837, and not long afterwards his mother, Lady Georgina Ashburnham, ran away from his father, Henry Mitford, and went to live with Francis Molyneux whom she subsequently married.

  Bertram was sent to Eton at the age of eight. He had been there some years when his first cousin and exact contemporary Algernon Charles Swinburne joined him. He mentions this in his Memories, adding that the aureole of golden hair ascribed to the poet as a boy was really ordinary red. One detects a certain irritation in his references to Swinburne, probably because of the fame of his remarkable cousin and also because of his doubtful reputation and eccentric behaviour. Grandfather was very conventional.

  After school and Oxford, Bertram Mitford joined the Diplomatic service and served in Russia and the Far East. He fell in love with Japan, which when he was there en poste was just emerging from its centuries-old isolation; he saw a medieval Japan hardly changed since the days of Lady Murasaki which was thenceforward quickly to disappear. A notable linguist who could speak both Chinese and Japanese, he translated a number of Japanese legends and stories; his Tales of Old Japan was a success and was reprinted several times.1

  When he was thirty-seven he married Lady Clementine Ogilvy; they had nine children. Their eldest son was killed in the First World War, and when Grandfather died in 1916 my father inherited.

  Grandmother idolized her husband and his children revered him. It so happens that everything he did and everything he admired is now completely out of fashion, beginning with Batsford, in Gloucestershire, where he built a large ‘Tudor’ house. His garden, once famous, is just the opposite of what most people now think a garden should be; drifts of daffodils in the grass are considered gaudy, blue cedars beyond the pale though they are still planted in the suburbs of Paris, a favoured setting for municipal playing fields.

  The style of his memoirs is equally unfashionable; there is nothing about his states of mind, or his wife and children or the mother who ran away. As to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whom he so greatly reverenced, to say that he is out of fashion would be understatement; he is abhorred as one of the most pernicious and wrong-minded thinkers ever to put pen to paper. His long books were lovingly translated one after another by Grandfather, who made the journey to Bayreuth not only for the music but also in order to see Chamberlain who married Wagner’s daughter Eva. He became friends with the whole family. Winifred Wagner told me that Grandfather’s photograph always stood on Siegfried Wagner’s writing table.

  He was devoted to King Edward VII and helped him with the garden at Sandringham. The King once visited Batsford and upset my puritanical Grandmother by asking for Mrs. Keppel to be invited. About sixty years later Kitty Ritson told me: ‘Mother and I were to have gone to Batsford for the King’s visit, but at the last moment Mother said that I must be left behind. When I asked why, she said it was because a great friend of the King’s was to be there,’ an explanation which puzzled Kitty at the time.

  In old age Grandfather became almost stone deaf; he occupied himself with gardening, playing patience and reading Nietzsche, immured in a silent world. He had spent his fortune on Batsford so that when he died a great deal had to be sold; as a family we were always short of money.

  Grandfather Bowles was a very different person. Born in 1843 he was the illegitimate son of an early Victorian cabinet minister, Milner Gibson. Except that her name was Susan Bowles, nobody knows who his mother was. Tom Bowles’s father brought him up with his own numerous family; fortunately Mrs. Milner Gibson loved Tom. Because of his illegitimacy he was sent to school in France, and he kept certain French habits of the eighteen fifties to the end of his life. He insisted upon a déjeuner at 11.30; this meant that he always lunched alone and made him an inconvenient guest when he stayed with us. At dinner he was convivial.

  When he was twenty-five he founded a magazine, Vanity Fair, now remembered for the Spy and Ape cartoons of nota bilities. It was scurrilous and witty, and as well as a little fortune it made him countless enemies.

  Like my other grandfather he married a Scotch girl, Jessica, daughter of Major General C. G. Evans-Gordon. She died at the age of thirty-five leaving him with four young children. He had a passion for the sea and held a master mariner’s certificate; after the death of his wife he spent months at sea in a sailing yacht with his four children, the youngest aged three. The little girls were always dressed in sailor clothes and he put his boys into the Navy.

  For many years he was Conservative M.P. for King’s Lynn. An expert on sea law and sea power, Punch caricatured him as an old salt with a wooden leg. He was clever, sarcastic and opinionated; the enemies he had made with Vanity Fair never forgave him his jokes; he was not given office.

  I can remember both grandfathers, but Grandmother Redes dale I knew well for I was grown up when she died. A merry, rosy, immensely fat old lady, deeply interested in her children and grandchildren and their governesses and nurses and households, she spent most of the year at Redesdale Cottage near the Scotch border. In the winter she came south and visited us and various cousins, but she was based on London where she stayed at some huge and fairly cheap hotel. Farve said: ‘Mother spends her time in the hall of the Charing Cross Hotel receiving the guests.’

  With her many chins, pink complexion and dimples she looked innocent and babyish. Every new baby in our family when it first opened its blue eyes was said by Nanny to be very like the Dowager’, though the truth was the other way about.

  I am now several years older than Grandmother was when we moved into Batsford and she went up to Redesdale in accordance with the old English custom whereby when a man dies his widow has a sort of minor suttee imposed upon her and has to leave her home immediately to make way for the new generation; if she is lucky the granny is invited for a few days once a year, just to see how her daughter-in-law has changed everything. It is impossible to imagine Grandmother rushing about as we do, motoring herself all over Europe alone like Pam; or swimming and sun-bathing; or, like Debo, shooting; impossible to imagine her giving a passing thought to fashion. In the nineteen-sixties when very short skirts were the fashion Nancy said: ‘Now we shall have to choose whether to be dowdy or ridiculous.’

  ‘Which will you choose?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, ridiculous of course,’ she replied.

  Bertrand Russell was Grandmother’s first cousin, their mothers, daughters of Lord Stanley of Alderley, having been sisters. Grandfather Redesdale’s first cousin, as I have said, was Swinburne; their mothers too were sisters. We were proud of these two cousins, each in his own way a rebel of genius and neither approved of by our elders, and from a far distance a little reflected glory seemed to fall upon us. A much nearer relation, however, was Susan Bowles; yet although we once tried to discover something about her it was already too late, she was swallowed up in the mists of time.

  Grandmother Redesdale told us that when she was first married, one night at the opera Grandfather whispered: ‘My mother is in the stage box.’ Grandmother could dimly see an old lady with white hair. They never met; divorce in those days was an insurmountable barrier. This great-grandmother was born in 1805; when she died in 1882 she had been married to Francis Molyneux for forty years. Some say that he, and not Henry Mitford, was our great-grandfather. Nobody knows, and presumably nobody cares.

  The question marks remain. In any case, even if ‘everything’ were known about one’s forebears, for the most part it would only be a list of names. All the same, their genes partly make us what we are. Physically I resemble Grandfather Redesdale and like him I am deaf, but my grandparents are no more responsible for me than are my grandchildren:

  CATHERINE

  JASPER

  VALENTINE

  SEBASTIAN

  DAPHNE

  PATRICK

  MARINA

  LOUIS

  ALEXANDER


  PATRICK

  to whom I dedicate this book.

  Temple de la Gloire, Orsay, 1977

  New Chapters 29-33

  To end this story, I had a party for my ninetieth birthday. All my descendants came, on a brilliant June day, and filled my flat to overflowing. I had left the Temple and come to live in Paris. Jerry had retired, to his house in Ireland, he organised the move for me after nearly fifty years, and I came to live near Alexander and Charlotte.

  Paris, 2002

  2.

  ‘… SHE CAN’T LIVE LONG’

  When I was born, on an afternoon in June 1910, my mother cried. She was to have seven children, six of them girls, and she wanted only boys. I was the fourth child, and in my case it was particularly annoying because had I been a boy the family would have been nicely balanced: two of each.

  We had a nurse called the unkind Nanny, who left when I was four months old because it had been discovered that she was in the habit of knocking Nancy’s head against a wooden bedpost, on purpose, for a punishment. When she first saw me, aged an hour or so, the unkind Nanny said: ‘She’s too beautiful; she can’t live long.’ Modesty does not forbid me to repeat her words, for anyone who has ever seen a new-born baby knows very well how plain, not to say repulsive, I must have seemed to a normal person. Nancy once described a newborn baby as a howling orange in a black wig’, while François Mauriac wrote of his own infant son: ‘Bébé n’est qu’un paquet de chair hurlant et malodorant.’ The Nanny’s observation was reported to me by my siblings when I was old enough to understand, and it made a great difference to my childhood. Perhaps she really knew that I should not live long. When life became unendurable, when all the others in concert were teasing, I could sometimes stop them by a reminder: ‘You know I can’t live long. You’ll be sorry.’