My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosley22 - Personal Life after the WarJOHN HEIGHT'S advice to those in political trouble was: 'Say it again, but be ruderthe second time;' advice which in our circumstances at the end of the war seemed tome sound. Mr. Churchill observed to 'mutual friends' that we adopted an attitude ofdefiance. I had no regret for my stand against the war, only regret for the destructionof Europe and the danger to Britain which I had foreseen. At this point we begin toenter the modern period, my life and action since the war. I was determined to beginas soon as possible the political action which I had throughout resolved to resumedirectly I was free, but it may be of interest first to describe our personal life and someof the adventures we undertook to secure our complete freedom.At the end of the war our restrictions within England were lifted and we were able tomove from our house and small agricultural holding at Crux Easton, Hampshire, to aneleven-hundred acre farm I had recently bought at Crowood, near Ramsbury inWiltshire. Nine hundred acres of the farmland were in hand and the farming of it wasa considerable undertaking, but I entered into this health-restoring task with zest.After our experience, it was good to put our roots back into the soil. This wasdifferent from the farming of my youth, because in place of the strong grazing of myStaffordshire homeland we had light to medium land which could only be developedinto good grass by the modern ley system. We ran a mixed farm of arable and dairycattle. The expert staff of our hereditary farming in Staffordshire had been gatheredover generations and continued from father to son; a large family which had longsince been dispersed. I was now dependent on the help of a few good local peoplewho had worked formerly on the farm, and on the kindly assistance of the waragricultural committee. In addition to my long absence from the business, I was anovice to arable farming; and, as always, I was in too much of a hurry. Here I learnedthe useful lesson that Nature cannot be forced beyond her measured and stately pace.We were in a strange land remote from the hereditary roots of either Mosleys orMitfords, but we benefited again from the friendly and tolerant attitude of the realpeople of England; they may differ politically, but they take others as they find themin private life. We also had some old friends in the neighbourhood who made our lifeagreeable, such as Lord Berners, a gifted musician, endowed with the liveliest of wits,who lived at Faringdon; Mrs. Reginald Fellowes—whom I had known long since asPrincesse de Broglie in Paris—lived at Donnington, near Newbury, where she wasdistinguished in England, as in Paris, as a beauty and hostess of exquisite mannerswhich were barbed with a legendary mechancete to people she found boring, butillumined by an affectionate and enduring loyalty to all her friends; John Betjemanand his wife Penelope, who had inherited strength of character from her father, my olddivisional commander Field-Marshal Sir Philip Chetwode, lived near Wantage, andwere among our most agreeable neighbours. Subsequent enquiry by journalistswhether we had suffered social ostracism after the war remained something of amystery to me, for I had not noticed it. Reflecting on this deep question, we concludedthat perhaps we had been saved from the dullards whose company in our previous lifeit had not always been easy to avoid; sweet can be the uses of ostracism, for evasiveaction in the countryside is sometimes difficult without being rude.My love, my passion for Europe consumed me with desire for the mainland directlythe war was over. Owing to my constant preoccupation with English politics before348 of 424