Free Irrepressible by Leslie Brody Page B

directly ask him when he would be returning to England or whether he intended to enlist, but she seemed to think that he was only in America because Decca wouldn’t leave.
    Esmond made his decision to train as a fighter pilot. Having fought on the ground in Spain, this time he preferred to be up in the sky. Since the United States had not yet joined the war, he had to enlist in Canada, the nearest Commonwealth nation. The couple sold their interest in the Roma Restaurant, packed up their car, and drove north back to Washington, D.C.
    What a ride it must have been: grief and sorrow over Bertrand, anxiety over Giles. Nellie didn’t come in for much sympathy; Esmond typically mistrusted her motives. He took her neutral prose as cool manipulation, her tender salutations as sentimental manipulation. But whatever Decca and Esmond thought of her, she was now suffering and alone. The landscape reflected their misery. It stormed for days with almost hurricane-force winds. Driving through flooded towns, they noted the still-intact standards of perverse social norms: whites-only water fountains and hand-scrawled signs announcing NO DOGS OR JEWS ALLOWED. As they taxed their little car
to breakdown, they strategized about money. There would be a gap before Esmond’s first check from the air force; Decca would need to find a job. She could go through the want ads—but better to comb their contacts. She knew her way around big houses; she was an attractive and energetic guest who lent beauty and a little radical frisson to an occasion. That was the customary exchange for a nice meal or a string pulled for a ticket or visa or job. Decca had repudiated many of the privileges that came with being the daughter of a British lord, but she could still invoke an air of hauteur when it was useful.
    “What a contrast to New York!” Esmond wrote from Washington to his friend Peter Nevile in London. “Instead of the rather wearing kind of sophistication of endless radioish repartee, etc. You get a lot of people sitting around talking about a ‘social program.’” A young labor lawyer newly arrived in Washington by the name of Robert Treuhaft noted the capital’s “very powerful anti-fascist, anti-Hitler spirit.” To Decca it seemed the best place to find a job and companions while Esmond was away. She was impressed by the way so many young supporters of President Roosevelt “lived and worked with a crusading enthusiasm.” Many of the staff workers in Washington identified themselves as New Dealers (after Roosevelt’s policies to revive the economy in the wake of the Great Depression). Decca shared their idealism, collected their literature, and soon employed the local bureaucratic lexicon of aid schemes and benefit packages and farm subsidies .
    She and Esmond made the rounds of cause parties and benefits. She was the aristo-renegade who had publically denounced her family’s connection to fascism. He was the veteran who had fought in Spain. At the end of May, Decca’s brother-in-law, Diana’s husband Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, was arrested and imprisoned for activities threatening the defense of the realm. In July, Diana was also arrested for being a security risk. Nancy Mitford, among others, had secretly informed on Diana. “Not very sisterly,” Nancy admitted, but it was the thing to do.
    In Washington, among the socialites and smart-setters who tended to lean left, Decca and Esmond found a few new friends. Kay Meyer (later
Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post ) and Decca found they had a great deal in common. Both had been born in 1917 and brought up in homes patrolled by nannies and maids. As unenthusiastic debutantes, both had veered off the beaten path for girls of wealth and well-positioned families. While Decca had escaped to Spain, Kay went to college, where she became a dedicated New Dealer. Both had fathers who had powerful personalities and extravagant résumés that included