My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyof Derek Jackson to his unit and the departure of our other relations to their cottage atSwinbrook, which was not far away. We were left alone with Pamela, to whom wewere devoted, and the detective, who was most agreeable to us. After a few days, thePress siege was called off and we were able to walk in the garden without trouble.Then suddenly full drama exploded into this quiet country retreat. The ChiefConstable of Oxford with accompanying cohorts arrived with orders that we mustleave at once. For it transpired that the Home Office had inadvertently directed us intothe inner sanctum of the Air Ministry's secrets.Long afterwards we learned that Derek Jackson was then engaged in someexperiments which resulted in inventions to baffle German aircraft; there is a gooddeal about it in Sir Winston Churchill's memoirs.' In addition to gaining the D.F.C.and A.F.C. for active service flying, he was a physicist of the first order; an almostunique and in time of war invaluable combination. His scientific knowledge, whichlater led him to one of Oxford's chairs as a professor of physics, was, of course, a veryrecondite subject for a layman. With the worst will in the world on all sides he wouldhave had a hard job to explain to me what it was all about, and with even more evilintent, I should have had an even harder job under close house arrest in Oxfordshire tocommunicate the stuff to anyone else. However, thought is the chief absentee fromthe official mind at such moments, and at the sound of the reveille in the Air Ministrythe Home Office fell into a fine old flap.It was a question of finding somewhere to sleep, and it was not easy, as LadyRedesdale had no room in her cottage, and any other possibility was far away. Finally,we went to the Shaven Crown Hotel at Shipton-under-Wychwood, which happened atthe time to be empty and also had room for the children. All this was at once reportedin the Press, which had been active throughout, and the Communist Party, with timeon its hands in other people's wars, at once canvassed the villagers to petition for ourreturn to jail. Despite the belief freely expressed in private and Government circlesthat we would be lynched if we were released among the British people, theCommunist Party, we were credibly informed, failed to obtain a single signatureamong the regular villagers. We were treated throughout this period of adversity inthe English countryside not only with toleration but with kindness and even withfriendship. It was indeed a moving and healing experience to find the real people ofEngland exactly the same as I remembered in my long and intimate experience ofthem, during my country childhood, my army days in peace and war, and my politicalfriendships in the kindly homes of the workers in all the diverse industries of our land.Their fair and firm attitude was particularly remurkable in that we had throughoutbeen the object of a hostile Press and continuous political agitation, which was notconfined to the communists. When in subsequent years it was sometimes alleged thatI was an object of hatred among the British people, I could truly reply that we neverfound a trace of it outside the square mile comprising Westminster, Whitehall andFleet Street, where the tale was first invented and then assiduously propagated.My chief concern at that time was my companions still left in jail and concentrationcamps. Most of them had been released and conditions by then were certainlyimproved, but a number remained. I felt they were having a worse time than I was.Some of them were held until the end of the war eighteen months later, and this, ofcourse, worried me more than anything else. Happily, only one other married couplewas still detained in Holloway with us when we were released, and by a strange345 of 424