Memoirs of an ex-menace

February 5, 1997
Issue 

Hons and Rebels
By Jessica Mitford
Indigo, 1996. 227 pp., $16.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Jessica Mitford, born in 1917 into a family of rural English aristocrats, had by age 15 declared herself for communism and later, during the '40s, graduated to a fully fledged member of the Red Menace in the USA.

An ex-menace after Hungary 1956, she left the party but not her principles and wrote classic investigative accounts of the exploitative rip-offs in the funeral and other industries. It is a delight to see the first volume of her entertaining autobiography republished at a time when we could do with a lot more Red Menace.

Lord and Lady Redesdale had produced a family of seven including the famous author of frivolous novels and "U and Non-U language" (Nancy), two fascists (Diana, who married the leader of the British Union of Fascists, and Unity Valkyrie, who became part of Hitler's inner circle), and one communist (Jessica).

Jessica rebelled against her luxurious but stifling lot in life, after imbibing home education at the hands of her Tory mother (English Empire good; Filthy Huns, Russian Bolshies, Black Hordes of Africa bad), smuggling her pet lamb into her bed each night during the 1926 general strike to save it from being slaughtered by the Bolshies on the TUC, and generally being primed for the life of rich debutante and baby-making fodder for some vacuous upper class twit.

She fought the monotony of her childhood with torchlight reading of D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley in bed; discovering the excitement of socialist literature which explained that human nature is not the cause of wars, poverty and wealth; and hero-worship of Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill's second cousin and elite school student rebel against militarism, family and tradition.

She was soon accusing Nancy of being a "parlour pink" and her father of being a "feudal remnant". She engaged in battles with the black-shirted Unity from behind her bust of Lenin and piles of Daily Workers.

Still partly in the nature of sibling sport, though, the two sisters still found time for "their own very peculiar version of the United Front" against their mother by sneaking £5 each from their family's stall at a Tory fete to send to their respective political causes. Jessica wonders how the Communist Party would have reacted to the £5 as "donation from the Annual Conservative Fete of Oxfordshire".

The need to take sides over the Spanish Civil War eventually drove Jessica to serious political commitment, eloping with Esmond Romilly, by now a veteran of the International Brigades. To Spain they went, where Jessica fired one shot in anger, posing greater danger to a nearby tree than to Mussolini's fascists behind Franco's lines.

Married, against the protests and legal stratagems of her family, they returned to England, where, wary of what they saw as the obsessive discipline and "false theatrics" of the CPGB, they joined the Labour Party, but remained staunch "fellow-travellers" in the cause of anti-fascism.

In 1939, depressed by Britain's policy of appeasement of Hitler, and driven to distraction by a process-server chasing them for an enormous unpaid electricity bill ("it had never been explained" to Jessica "that electricity had to be paid for"), they went to the USA, mixing with the "bright, sincere group of liberals" in the Democrats' New Deal bureaucracy as well as "Communists, Trotskyists, independent socialists of all kinds and even one or two rather moth-eaten anarchists".

They vowed to join the Communist Party and fight fascism. The Hitler-Stalin pact temporarily halted that joint goal, but the invasion of Russia by the Nazis put it back on the agenda.

Esmond was killed in action in 1941. Jessica, with baby in tow, remarried and awaited future challenges, difficulties and frequent joys in the struggles of the embattled, admirable (and often comical) CPUSA. Truly does she call, her second volume of autobiography, punning the words of "The Internationale", A Fine Old Conflict.

Jessica loved the thrill and the joy of battle over great causes. She admittedly lacked the "patience, forbearance and natural self-discipline that the worker brings to his struggle for a better life". Her aristocratic heritage, which in her upper class peers produced superficial rebellion and social irresponsibility, lent itself to an irreverence and sense of fun that a staid, Stalinist-deformed CP could not handle. The CP attracted the best and lost the best.

Mitford's autobiography is a fine legacy of political awakening, written with an easy fluency and a devilish sense of fun.

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