Diana’s closest confidante in the family during this period was Unity and they wrote to each other regularly during the pre-war years. Their correspondence, especially Unity’s, forms the bulk of surviving letters from the late 1930s. Incongruously written in the gushing tones of breathless excitement normally reserved for romantic fiction, the two sisters’ letters about Nazi Germany unavoidably dominate this section.
In the autumn of 1933, sixteen-year-old Jessica and her first cousin Ann Farrer travelled to Paris. Here they attended classes at the Sorbonne and lived with a Madame Paulain who was conveniently lax about chaperoning her charges and allowed the girls to slip out unobserved to nightclubs and the Folies-Bergère. In letters to her mother Jessica was careful not to mention these escapades but she did describe the riots that broke out in Paris following the sacking of the city’s right-wing police chief. She quoted from the communist daily, l‘Humanité, as well as from the Daily Mail, and expressed regret that her quartier had been much too quiet during the unrest. On returning to England, she endured a season as a debutante, a custom that went against her progressive principles but which she confessed to have been ‘rather guiltily looking forward to’. In 1935, Jessica read two more books that influenced her deeply: The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, published in 1933, which detailed the horrors perpetrated after the burning of the Reichstag when communist and other opponents of the Nazis were rounded up, savagely beaten and in some cases murdered; and Out of Bounds: The Education of Giles and Esmond Romilly, written by two rebellious young cousins of the Mitfords. The Romilly brothers were the sons of Clementine Churchill’s sister, Nellie, and nephews by marriage, therefore, of Winston Churchill. Esmond’s contribution to Out of Bounds enthralled Jessica because his attitudes and opinions were so similar to her own. As a schoolboy at Wellington College, Esmond had interrupted Armistice Day commemorations by distributing anti-war leaflets, started a subversive magazine attacking public schools and, aged sixteen, had run away to work in a left-wing London bookshop. Jessica had followed his exploits – the subject of scandalized family gossip – for several years and hero-worshipped her cousin from afar, judging her own revolt against parental authority trivial by comparison.
In early 1937, Jessica and Esmond met by chance at the house of a cousin. Esmond had recently come back from Spain, where he had been fighting with the International Brigades and where he was planning to return as correspondent for the News Chronicle. For nineteen-year-old Jessica, this was the chance to translate her romantic idealism into reality and she begged Esmond to take her with him. They improvised a plan to trick the Redesdales into believing that Jessica was on holiday with friends, drew the money out of her ‘running-away’ account and disappeared to Spain. It was two weeks before their ruse was discovered. Nancy and Peter, to whom it was thought Jessica would be most likely to listen, went out to try to persuade her to come home but the attempt ended in a bitter row. Jessica had made up her mind and she and Esmond were married in Bayonne on 18 May, with Lady Redesdale in attendance. If there was any residual element of playfulness about Jessica’s politics – Nancy used teasingly to call her a ‘ballroom communist’ – it was eradicated by her marriage to Esmond, which also marked the beginning of a hardening in her feelings towards her family. Esmond was not amused by Unity’s friendship with the ‘sweet’ Führer, and although Diana had sided with Jessica over her elopement, Esmond’s hatred of fascism was unconditional.
Jessica’s break with Diana was final and, except in 1973 when Nancy was dying, they did not meet or correspond after 1937. Whenever Unity was in England, however, Jessica would arrange to see her – without Esmond’s knowledge – and although few of their letters from the period have survived, they continued to write to each other up to, and after, the war. That Jessica never broke with Unity as she had done with Diana – Nazism, after all, was no less abhorrent to her than fascism – highlights the complexity of the relations between the sisters. In a letter to her mother, Jessica wrote that she considered Diana a dangerous enemy and the fact that she ‘was once related’ to her made no difference to her feelings, yet in the very same letter she sent her love to Unity. In Unity’s last letter to her parents before she tried to kill herself, she sent ‘particular love’ to Jessica. Perhaps the close ties Jessica and Unity had formed as children were too strong to break, or perhaps Unity’s childishly boastful behaviour masked her sincerity of purpose and meant that Jessica could never take her seriously. Or did Jessica recognize in Unity a fellow zealot whom she could respect, even though they were at opposite ends of the political spectrum? Whatever the reasons, Unity’s espousal of Nazism remained an unsolvable riddle to her sister. ‘Why had she’, Jessica mused, ‘to those of us who knew her the most human of people, turned her back on humanity?’
In February 1939, Jessica and Esmond left for the United States. They had expected a storm of indignation to greet Chamberlain’s signing of the Munich Agreement, which handed over part of Czechoslovakia to Germany, and when it did not materialize the spectre of a completely Nazified Europe no longer seemed remote. Esmond looked to America for a new adventure, somewhere to explore while waiting to see whether Britain would fight. Money difficulties also contributed to their decision to leave the country: they had run up debts on their London flat and were being hounded by bailiffs. When Jessica came into a trust fund of £100 on her twenty-first birthday, rather than pay the bills they decided to spend it on one-way tickets to New York.
For Deborah, alone among the sisters, the sale of Swinbrook in 1936 was a lasting sorrow and spelt an end to what she regarded as an idyllic childhood. Lord Redesdale’s fortunes had not recovered from the Depression and he could no longer meet the cost of maintaining a large house and estate. Although Lady Redesdale had grown fond of the village and enjoyed living in the country, she went along with her husband’s decision. They moved to the Old Mill Cottage on the outskirts of High Wycombe, some thirty miles from London, taking with them Jessica and Deborah, the only two sisters still at home. The picture in the public mind of the Mitfords’ childhood is largely formed by Jessica’s first volume of memoirs, Hons and Rebels, and by Nancy’s novels. Both Jessica and Nancy remembered their childhood essentially as a period of unhappiness and discontent, and their parents as cold and unloving. Deborah had a much easier time than her older sisters; she found Lady Redesdale no stricter than other mothers and was fond of her father. The shock waves sent out by the escapades of her older siblings reached her as distant disturbances and were not sufficient to undermine the security of her well-ordered life, in which lessons with a succession of governesses alternated with long hours in the stable and on the hunting field. There was also a single term at The Monkey Club, a London finishing school from which Lady Redesdale quickly removed her when Deborah told her that it was full of communists. Jessica’s elopement, however, came as a complete surprise and, following closely after the sale of Swinbrook, shook her profoundly. It was a betrayal of the complicity she thought she shared with her beloved childhood companion and it brought an end to their intimacy. Jessica, who envied Deborah’s beauty and her position as their parents’ favourite, never realized how much she had meant to her youngest sister or understood how deeply her disappearance had upset her. To add to Deborah’s distress, the Redesdales forbade her to go to Jessica’s wedding and would not allow her to visit the Romillys when they returned to England. Although Deborah managed to see her sister a few times in secret, the visits were not a success. She did not get on with Esmond, did not like his communist