3 Bryan was so distraught by the break-up of his marriage that he could not face the resulting upheaval in domestic arrangements. He asked Diana to pack up their London house in Cheyne Walk and find him a flat.
4 Diana had joked to Nancy that she was going to stock up on ‘a trousseau’ of expensive clothes while she could still afford them.
1 Randolph Churchill (1911–68). Winston Churchill’s only son was related to the Mitfords through his mother, Clementine. He was a great friend of Tom and had a crush on Diana as a teenager. In 1932, he began his journalistic career covering the German elections for the Sunday Graphic. Married to Pamela Digby 1939–46 and to June Osborne 1948–61.
2 Doris Delavigne (1900–42). Beautiful, uninhibited daughter of a Belgian father and English mother. Married the gossip columnist Viscount Castlerosse in 1928.
3 John Sutro (1904–85). Talented mimic, musician and film producer from a well-off Jewish London family. A lifelong friend of Nancy and Diana, he was best man at Nancy’s wedding and Jonathan Guinness’s godfather. Married Gillian Hammond in 1940.
4 Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne (1880–1944). Diana’s father-in-law, a distinguished soldier and politician, was assassinated in Cairo by members of the Stern gang, a Jewish terrorist group.
5 Robert Byron (1905–41). Travel writer whose best-known book, The Road to Oxiana (1937), was a record of his journeys through Iran and Afghanistan. Nancy counted him as one of her dearest friends and mourned him for many years after his death at sea.
6 Nigel Birch (1906–81). A tart and witty friend of Tom who became a Conservative MP after the war. Married Esmé Glyn in 1950.
1 Diana’s father-in-law had hired private investigators to gather evidence that could be used in the divorce hearing.
2 A Christmas party at the Moynes’ London house.
3 The Redesdales and Tom blamed Nancy for supporting Diana’s decision to leave Bryan.
1 Henry Yorke (1905–73). Author, under the pseudonym Henry Green, of nine highly original novels, including Blindness (1926), Living (1929) and Doting (1952). Married Adelaide (Dig) Biddulph in 1929.
2 Lady Cecilia Keppel (1910–2003). A childhood friend of Diana. The Redesdales had asked her to invite their daughter to Switzerland in the hopes that removing her from Mosley would make her change her mind.
3 Henry Lamb (1883–1960). A founder member of the Camden Town Group who had painted a portrait of Diana the previous year. Married, in 1928, to Lady Pansy Pakenham (1904–99).
Diana (right) with her childhood friend Cecilia Keppel in Mürren, Switzerland, 1933.
4 Adele Astaire (1897–1981). Older sister and original dance partner of Fred Astaire with whom she starred on stage until 1932, when she married Lord Charles Cavendish, second son of the 9th Duke of Devonshire and uncle of Deborah’s future husband.
5 The cook at Biddesden.
6 Bryan Guinness’s secretary.
7 At about this time Nancy wrote a privately circulated short story, The Old Ladies, loosely based on herself and Diana. The two old ladies lived in Eaton Square and had a friend, the Old Gentleman, who was based on Mark Ogilvie-Grant.
Letter from Unity to Diana.
By mid-1933, to all appearances, the three eldest Mitford sisters were settling down. At almost thirty, Nancy had at last reached the end of her affair with Hamish and was engaged to Peter Rodd, a clever, handsome banker, son of the diplomat Lord Rennell, who seemed on the surface a far better prospective husband than Hamish. Pamela was living in a cottage at Biddesden and managing the Guinness farm. Diana’s affair with Oswald Mosley was still regarded with disapproval by her parents, but her divorce from Bryan and the sudden death of Mosley’s wife had weakened the Redesdales’ opposition. The three youngest Mitfords were giving no outward cause for worry. Unity had become a keen member of the British Union of Fascists but this had been kept secret from her parents and they had no reason to suspect her growing fanaticism. Jessica, who was going to Paris for a year to learn French, was about to have her first taste of longed-for freedom. Thirteen-year-old Deborah was content in the Swinbrook schoolroom.
But beneath the deceptively calm surface, personal choices and political events combined to make the years leading up to the war a period of turmoil in the sisters’ lives. Nancy had accepted Peter’s proposal of marriage on the rebound, just a week after Hamish, desperate to extricate himself from their sham engagement, had pretended to be engaged to another woman. Peter, or ‘Prod’ as he soon became known in the family, was no more in love with Nancy than Hamish had been, but, like her, he was nearing thirty and was under pressure from his parents to marry. Peter’s career before meeting Nancy was as inglorious as his record after their marriage: he had been sent down from Oxford and was then sacked or had resigned from a succession of jobs, mostly found for him by his father. He was not only a drinker and a spendthrift, but pedantic and arrogant to boot. For Nancy, however, his proposal came as balm after the humiliation of being jilted by Hamish and she remained blind to his shortcomings. They were married at the end of 1933 and settled in Rose Cottage, a small house near Chiswick, where Nancy, in love with being in love, played for a while at being happy, writing to a friend, with no apparent irony, that she had found ‘a feeling of shelter & security hitherto untasted’. Since Pamela’s engagement to Oliver Watney had been called off, Nancy was now the only married Mitford – a not unimportant consideration as the eldest daughter. It was not long, however, before her determination to be amused by Peter’s inadequacies began to falter and her ability to overlook his unfaithfulness, neglect and over – spending was severely tested. In 1936, they moved into London, to Blomfield Road in Maida Vale, which suited Nancy because it brought her closer to her friends. But with no children – she suffered a miscarriage in 1938 – her marriage was increasingly unhappy.
Nancy could never take politics very seriously. Peter had left-wing leanings and she too became a socialist for a