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Nicholas Mosley: I have certainly always seen myself as what used to be called an outsider—outside the usual strata and classes of society. I think by instinct I felt myself a loner. I suppose I was what was called an aristocrat, but being my father’s son I did not fit easily into this category, because by the time I was growing up my father was seen as a renegade by the aristocracy. He was first a socialist and then a fascist. Going to Eton might have made me an insider, and I suppose to some extent it did, but this was balanced by what was seen as my father’s increasingly unacceptable politics, and indeed by his ending up in prison.

SR: Eton helped you to accommodate your 'outsiderness’?

NM: One of the things Eton was good at was accommodating oddities. They did not try to mould everyone into the same form, though to some extent they achieved this without trying. There were—and are—Old Etonian stereotypes, but also probably more eccentrics than at other public schools. I had some good times at Eton, but didn’t really approve of it, and made up my mind even then not to send any sons of mine to it. What Eton taught one was to have the confidence to charm one’s way through life; and although I now don’t think there’s much wrong with upper-class charm—it makes social wheels run smoothly—at the time I thought it was a trickery which enabled people to take nothing seriously. Etonians were apt to think they were OK just because they were Etonians; you could charm your way through life.
People are apt to think that being an aristocrat and being a fascist are much the same thing. But my father was hated by much of the aristocracy, although my mother’s background did something to alleviate this. My mother’s father was an archetypal aristocrat, Lord Curzon; and even after my mother died, when I was nine, I could still feel part of her sisters’—my aunts’—world when I wanted to.

SR: But was not your father a very aristocratic fascist, regarding the games he played? Did he not—as you mention in your biography of him Rules of the Game / Beyond the Pale—use aristocratic charm both in public and private life? Was not he, in the same way as you were saved from being a typecast aristocrat by his being a fascist, saved from being a typecast fascist by being an aristocrat?

NM: Well, he once joked to Lord Beaverbrook—‘You’re lucky, the English might have got a much worse fascist leader than
me’—meaning that there was always part of him that liked a hedonistic life apart from politics. He played his own style of games. In the days before he became a fascist his and my mother’s friends were mostly Bohemians—artists and writers or people involved in the arts—like the composer William Walton, or the Sitwells and Cecil Beaton. Their friendships were about having fun—flirting and showing off and being witty. My father’s friendships in this world were made through his wives—first my mother, and then his second wife Diana, who was a Mitford.

SR: The Mitfords belonged also to the aristocracy?

NM: Yes, but they were eccentrics, rebels. There have usually been a few ‘rogue’ aristocrats. People who played the accepted aristocratic games were for instance the family of my first wife Rosemary’s grandmother, Lady Desborough—they were the sort of aristocrats who all knew one another, who stayed in each other’s huge country houses at weekends. Oddly enough my two aunts, who belonged to this world, preferred the world of celebrities and politicians, people who wielded more obvious power.

SR: You were saying that your mother’s side was more aristocratic than your father’s. Was it an aristocratic thing that your mother was so often absent from your life as a child—I mean, during her lifetime. I always have a feeling when I am reading about your life that there is an absence of a mother-figure. Sending you away to boarding schools for example—one gets the impression that this sort of life was preferred, even encouraged. Doris Lessing, in the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade, writes about the Englishman’s ‘incarceration in boys’ schools, aged seven, to sob their hearts out for mummy night after night, with their heads beneath the bedclothes.’ What happens to a young boy who is brought up with a mother who is just an abstract object of yearning?

NM: I don’t think there was all that much sobbing for mothers, because, as you say, one probably didn’t see all that much of mothers anyway. The world of my sister Vivien and me (she was two years older than I) was dominated by Nanny. My earliest memories are of life in our London house, where I spent much of the time in the mid-1920s between the age of two and four. The house was near the Houses of Parliament because my father, and then my mother, were MPs. On the top floor was the nursery and night-nursery where I lived with my sister and Nanny; while we were little I think we had to have a nursery-maid too, this was the convention. Nanny was the centre of our lives. She shared the nursery and night-nursery with us, and when we were supposed to be asleep she used to come in and surreptitiously undress in the dark.

SR: And this was the case when your mother was still alive?

NM: Absolutely. Most days we didn’t see much of our mother even when she was at home. Nanny would take us down to her bedroom when she had had breakfast in bed—my mother and father always had separate bedrooms once they had settled into marriage; this was the convention—and we would bounce up and down on her bed and she might read us a story, and then we were taken back upstairs. We had a very strict routine. Later in the morning we were dressed up in rather smart clothes, polished shoes and gaiters—things that went over and above one’s shoes—and Nanny would take us up to the Parks which were about a mile away. There was St James’s Park, where there was a pond with pelicans, then Green Park, and finally Hyde Park, which was our objective; here a lot of other Nannies of upper-class children would be gathered with their prams. I suppose at first I must have been pushed in a pram; there is a photograph of my sister holding on to my pram and looking rather disgruntled because she had to walk.

SR: Where was your home exactly?

NM: Smith Square, number 8 Smith Square, a pretty early Georgian or Queen Anne square between the Houses of Parliament and the Tate Gallery. There is a church in the middle of the square that was bombed in the war and is now used as a concert hall; in fact many of the houses were bombed—though number 8 is intact—and there are now some ugly buildings containing political-party headquarters. My earliest memories are of this house; we had an absolutely regular sort of life; we would go to the Park, come back for lunch, have a rest, play with our toys; and then if our mother was at home in the evening—our father often seemed to be away for days—Nanny would take us down to the drawing-room on the first floor where our mother would read to us again. She was good at this. I remember listening lying curled up on the drawing-room floor. Then we went up to the nursery again. And then if my mother and father were going out to dinner they might come up to say good night—such occasion is one of the few early memories I have of my father: he would tickle us and make jokes. Or if they were having people in to dinner we would lie awake and listen to the noise of people arriving. They made such a noise talking! I remember saying to Nanny—What on earth do they talk about? A little later when we were in our country house I remember creeping downstairs and listening outside the dining-room door; and everyone seemed to be talking and laughing at once, and surely no one could be listening.

SR: When did you get the house in the country? How old were you then?

NM: I couldn’t have been more than four. I think we moved in in 1927. Everything became much more free-and-easy then because my sister and I were allowed to go out and play on our own. There was a huge garden and a stream that ran round the house: people would be much more cautious nowadays about letting children play around and on this stream. Also we made friends with the servants. Our nursery life revolved around Nanny and the servants. There was Mr Cox, the butler—we always called him ‘Mr’—his domain was the pantry where there was a strange machine like a drum for sharpening knives. I remember it being a treat if I could work this machine; you put knives into slots and turned a handle and the knives came out sharpened or polished or whatever. Then there were Mabel and May, the parlourmaid and housemaid, and there seemed to be something mysterious about them because Nanny and our nursery-maid Stella used to whisper about them. In my memory I was still quite young when I gathered that they were a lesbian couple. But I didn’t quite see why this should seem so strange.

SR: And Nanny didn’t have any children herself?

NM: No, she gave her life really to looking after my sister and myself and then our much younger brother. She was a wonderful woman. She was the sixth or seventh of a family of seventeen children. Her father had been a gardener on a big estate. We came to know more about Nanny’s brothers and sisters and their families than we did about our own uncles and cousins, because Nanny used to tell us stories about them. She was a very good story-teller. She had siblings in Australia, Canada, Scotland; she was from one of those working-class families who came to people the Empire. My father and mother never talked about their own families—they weren’t on speaking terms with most of them. My mother and her older sister hadn’t been on speaking terms with their father when he died—they’d quarrelled with him about money which was supposed to have gone to them after their mother’s death, but which their father thought he had a right to keep his hands on. And they didn’t see their cousins because the family title and estate had gone to them, because grandfather Curzon had only had daughters. And my father had broken off contact with his father when he had insulted him when he, my father, became a socialist. So we knew much more about Nanny’s family, and at weekends used to go to have tea with her sister.
The one time we did see a lot of our father and mother, when they used to go to the South of France or to Venice in the summer, and they would always take us with them. We used to stay in a grand hotel or a rented villa, and we would learn to swim, and jump off high rocks, and ‘aquaplane’—a precursor of water-skiing. I’ve got a home-movie of my mother teaching me how to swim. And my father was always jolly on these holidays, he used to carry us on his shoulders and whirl us around upside down.

SR: Didn’t your Nanny feel any contempt for your mother?

NM: Good heavens no, she adored her. All this was just the done thing. Nanny had been my mother’s nursery-maid. When she was fifteen she left home and went out to India to help look after my mother and her sister when my grandfather Curzon was Viceroy. She became enormously fond of my mother, but she had to leave when the family were back in England and my mother and her sisters were growing up. She took jobs with other families, but she had promised my mother that she would come back when she, my mother, had children. And so she did—when my sister Vivien was born. And she stayed with our family for virtually the rest of her life.
I don’t know if she ever much questioned the upper-class carry on. It was her own way of life after all. There is one story however I’ll probably tell you later. But Nanny never much approved of my father. She must have been aware that he flirted with everyone in sight, and she thought this was very hard on my mother.

SR: Your mother never had any affairs?

NM: I’m sure not. There was a time when my father was behaving very badly and my aunt Irene—my mother’s older sister—said to her—‘Look, why don’t you take the chance to have an affair, and this may bring him to his senses.’ But my mother always said my father was the only man she could ever love.

SR: I’ve mentioned how Doris Lessing has this idea (Walking in the Shade pp. 347–348) that the huge British Empire could only survive so long as there were these ‘motherless’ aristocratic boys sent to boarding schools at the age of eight, who would always have this romantic longing for their idealised imaginary mothers and in this way would never learn to have a proper relationship with real women. This would in turn incapacitate them from founding ‘normal’ families, toward whom they would primarily feel love and loyalty. In this way they could be loyal and at the service of the British Empire. One of the side effects of this system was the notorious homosexuality amongst pupils.

NM: Well I’m not sure where such psychoanalytical theorising takes one. Freud well knew the complexity of family and sexual relationships. Might it not be said that sending boys away to boarding schools saved the English from some of the absurdities of the Oedipus Complex, in which families are supposedly torn apart by the wild jealousy of fathers and growing-up sons fighting for the increasingly helpless mothers’ attention? It’s true about the homosexuality, but there’s ambiguity even about this. Might it not be better for adolescent boys to fall in love and experiment with other boys, than risk getting adolescent girls pregnant? Though at Eton in my experience there was a lot of homosexual talk and fantasising but not much sexual activity. And most of us grew out of it pretty quickly when girls were available to go out with. I don’t think many people think now that homosexuality becomes ingrained as a result of adolescent behaviour. I fell in love with a boy at school. We carried on every now and then. We both moved out to be satisfactory heterosexuals.
But adolescent homosexuality had been so easy! No fear of pregnancy, little jealousy, no bewildering social rules—one just had not to be caught. Then there seemed to be almost no sexual activity in the army in the war: there were rumours that they put bromide in our tea, and in Italy one was given fearful illustrated lectures about the dangers of venereal disease. Then after the war, back in England, there were suddenly myriads of desirable and apparently available girls—fashionable dances had immediately started up again—but such girls were also not available, because they were hedged around with precise rules. Also I could not understand how one was expected to fall in love with only one girl. It seemed natural to fall in love with the lot.

SR: And you couldn’t do much about your love of these girls?

NM: In those days there was still an upper-class taboo on going to bed with unmarried girls. One could dance with them, flirt with them, kiss them if they allowed this; but if they said no to anything, one had to stop. And one accepted this, because if one did make one pregnant there would be huge pressure on one to marry her, and one was not ready for this. If one wanted sex, one was supposed to go out and find a tart or an older woman.

SR: So then one went to bed with the girls’ mothers in a way?

NM: Well, one was more likely not to go to bed with anyone. But one could go some distance with unmarried girls. For this, one’s practice in homosexuality might be useful. But during my last year at Eton, one of my great friends who happened even then to be a roaring heterosexual, was determined to spend the first evening of the holidays in London picking up a tart. And he insisted that I was just the person to go along with him in this; by which I suppose I was rather flattered.

SR: How old were you then?

NM: Eighteen. There was a nightclub called ‘The Nut House’ which was said to have available girls. I went along with him half feeling dashing and half trusting that nothing would happen. My friend chatted up some ‘hostesses’ who said they were only dancing partners. So he had a word with the doorman who said he could get hold of two girls in a taxi. By this time I was very drunk, and when we piled into the taxi my friend got hold of one of the girls who was quite pretty, and I found myself with someone who was old enough to be my grandmother. The taxi took us to a room somewhere where I could plausibly make out I was impotent—and my friend was left having to worry about venereal disease.

SR: How was it from an erotic point of view when your dad married this beautiful and very young woman who was only thirteen years older than you? Was she a mother figure to you, or did you fall in love with her?

NM: I recognised she was beautiful, but I had absolutely no sexual nor romantic feelings toward her. I liked being with her because I could talk to her about books. My mother’s family were readers of best-sellers: Diana introduced me, for instance, to Proust. When she and my father were living in a very beautiful house in Derbyshire in the late 1930s, and my father was often away on speaking tours, and my sister and my brother’s entourage preferred to stay in my mother’s old family home, Diana and I would often be on our own with two servants in the huge Derbyshire house. And then I could talk to her about anything. I had cottoned on that she was a friend of Hitler’s, and I would say—‘Look here, Hitler’s so obviously a bad thing’—this was the style of Eton—and she would explain—well what did she explain? But she was very patient. And then in 1938 she said that if my father permitted it she would take me to Germany to meet Hitler, because this would tell me more than words. But then there was the Munich crisis, and this plan was not possible.