When they returned to England they went to live in the East End of London, not then a fashionable area, where they joined the Bermondsey Branch of the Labour Party. Neither her family's pursuit nor high-level diplomatic intervention had any effect and they were married by the British Consul in Bayonne.
In 1937 she made headlines by eloping to Spain with Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill's and another adolescent rebel from the ranks of the upper classes, who had joined the International Brigade to fight against Franco.
Whether they really did compete in decorating their rooms with posters and portraits of Hitler and Stalin hardly matters what is incontrovertible is that by the time she was 18 Jessica had found the basis for the political and social beliefs that were to shape her life and was planning to run away to put them into practice. "In other words I should write the obit and you collect the fee whilst retaining what Film Folk call creative control over the content?" It was even more characteristic that when she sent him a list of her books she invented one in order, as she put it, "to test your ability as researcher/obit-writer".ĭuring the 1930s the nursery games and the politics of the schoolroom became serious, as Jessica found herself repelled by her sister Unity's addiction to Nazi ideas and increasingly drawn herself to the socialist cause. It was entirely characteristic of her and of the tone of many of her relationships that when in 1980 Philip Toynbee, one of her oldest friends, wrote to inform her that he had been asked to prepare her obituary her response to his request for information was crisp.
Displays of emotion were discouraged, as was undue attention to the sadnesses of life, or indeed death, known to her as the Reaper. Jessica Mitford, the writer and campaigner, lived for most of her life in Oakland, California, among lawyers, academics and left-wing activists, without ever losing the voice and attributes of her eccentric but privileged English upbringing.
0 kommentar(er)
