My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleywho was a widow, rich, beautiful—and an American. Lady Cunard used to explain inexquisitely embroidered detail how touched she was by this unexpected attention.Lord Curzon's policy and record in his various high offices can be left to history. Thepersonal story of him can be left at my wedding day, a most trying occasion for one ofhis character and temperament, which illustrated his deep good nature. The trials werenearly all my fault, perhaps in one respect also Cirnmie's. First, I was late. Lunchingtoo happily at the Ritz with an old Sandhurst and army friend, who was my best man,I was approached by Lady Cunard with the apposite inquiry, 'Were you not beingmarried five minutes ago?' We jumped up and hurried hatless down St. James's Streetto the Chapel Royal, where Lord Curzon and the bride were waiting. He said not aword, but Cimmie afterwards teased me by saying he was obviously thinking I hadrun out at the last moment. It was also awkward because two kings and two queenswere waiting—monarchs of Britain and Belgium, the latter had been at Hackwoodduring the war—and worse was to follow. Not realising the enormity of our youthfulenthusiasms, we had arranged for a passage from Tristan and Isolde to be played atthe end of the ceremony. It took far longer than we had realised, and all were standingthroughout. To keep two kings and two queens standing while you played yourfavourite music was not included in Lord Curzon's social register, but it was theyoung people's day and their every whim must be satisfied. He took it all on the chinand never blinked an eyelid. That was good nature.Our honeymoon was spent at Portofino, near Genoa, then an unspoilt fishing village.We lived in the Castello Brown, which belonged to the family of Francis Yeats-Brown, who wrote Bengal Lancer. History and beauty were there in rare combination.Both Dante and Napoleon had slept in the medieval fortress; across the lovely bay youcould see at Spezia the tragic water, wine-dark with Shelley's drowning; along theheights which linked Portofino with Rapallo strode Nietzsche in the ecstasy of writingZarathustra. Cimmie and I followed the same route more prosaically riding donkeys,and falling off them among the fireflies in the dusk. Every day we went through theorange groves to the sea, an enchantment which we recaptured the following year.Travel in those early years engaged us much and some account of it belongs properlyto this chapter of continuing life-experience and of the happiness of marriage, even ifit means anticipating a little in time and leaving politics for a moment. The memory ofLord Curzon should always be joined to a journey through India, the land to which asViceroy he gave so much. We v/ent to India in the winter of 1924. If contrast is theessence of life, it was certainly present in the diversity of this extraordinaryexperience. Within India we found extremes of beauty and of ugliness, of flauntingwealth and abysmal poverty.We determined to see everything, and we did—at that time some of the worst workingconditions and the vilest slums in the world. In Bombay the great tenement blockswith four families often living in one quite small room, each group with its separatefire and the only egress for the smoke, one window; in Calcutta shanty towns worsethan any I have seen anywhere else, with the main drain running down the centre ofthe street. Nothing could have prevented continual outbreaks of typhoid except thesterilising effect of the strong sun on the open cesspools. In the cotton mills theyworked for a wage of five shillings a week, often with modern machinery supplied byLancashire for its own suicide. It was no monument either to the humanity or to the101 of 424