Free Irrepressible by Leslie Brody Page A

business, but it made Decca miserable. Not knowing the extent of Unity’s injuries, she was at first “terrified” and “grieved” for her sister. She was also worried that her family might see fictitious quotes and think them authentic, when in this instance, Decca had loyally stood with the Mitfords and refused to speak to the press.
    In January, hearing the news that Unity had returned to England amid a media circus, she wrote again to her mother:
    Do please write & tell me all news of Boud, it is of course absolutely impossible to get anything reliable from the newspaper reports, & the last few days have been so terribly worrying, all the papers here have been saying the most dreadful things . . . Every paper says something different about Boud & how she became so ill, and it is so awful not knowing anything . However I am terrifically glad she is at home now as whatever is the matter with her she must be better off at Wycombe where she can have proper food & Blor & everyone.
    Muv withheld Unity’s true diagnosis from Decca for several more months. Their mother encouraged Decca to think that Unity had simply lost her memory and suggested that the patient might be well in six months; later, Muv amended the prediction to a year. By March, when Decca exchanged her first letters with Unity, she faced the reality that at age twenty-five, her sister was permanently brain-damaged. Unity would remain childlike and dim for the remaining eight years of her life.
    One of the reporters who plagued Decca asked whether it was true, as speculated in some papers, that Unity had shot herself after “a terrible quarrel with Hitler.” That rumor if confirmed might have meant that her sister had broken with the Nazi leader and perhaps in the end even become antifascist. (As long as the facts remained unclear, Decca could try to rationalize her sister’s behavior. If Unity had recanted, perhaps even Esmond might soften toward her.) Decca must have longed for, if not gentle commiseration, at least some straightforward help in manipulating the press. Esmond was the expert when it came to hustling reporters and finding out what they knew without giving the store away. But he fervently abjured all discussion of his Nazi sister-in-law. “I knew I couldn’t expect Esmond, who had never met her, to feel anything but disgust for her, so by tacit understanding we avoided discussing [Unity].” And her own sense of responsibility and antifascist fervor made it impossible for her to express any public sympathy for her sister.
    The couple’s partnership, built, according to Decca, on “estrangement from our families, the circumstances of our marriage, our constant wanderings about, the death of the baby, all had conspired to weld us into a self-sufficient unit, a conspiracy of two against the world.” Decca was rarely inclined to act alone, but she could when necessary. She had proven this when she had an abortion without informing Esmond. During the Christmas crisis, she coped with the press and her own anxieties and grieved for Unity on her own, with only the occasional letter from Muv to offer small comfort. By the spring of 1940, Miami, though it had many attributes of a last outpost, wasn’t nearly far enough away to escape their destinies as Romilly and Mitford.

CHAPTER 6
    O N MAY 10,1940, Hitler’s army invaded the Netherlands, and the day after, Uncle Winston succeeded Chamberlain as British prime minister. A letter from Nellie Romilly arrived containing a great deal more family news, none of it good: Esmond’s father, Bertram Romilly, had died of cancer, far more ill than they had known. And then on April 9, while Esmond’s brother, Giles, was reporting from Norway for the English paper the Daily Express , he had been captured by German troops. Nellie was alone, and although she implied that she was gallantly coping, there was desperation to be read between the lines: What were Esmond’s plans, she wondered? She didn’t