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I have been sick but I’m not any more now.”
    Decca wondered if her child would be a boy, and she hoped he would be pretty. Before the baby’s birth, she had a dream in which she was trapped in Swinbrook and awoke grateful to find herself back at Rotherhithe, where Esmond and she had made a quiet nest in the chaos. Their baby daughter was born December 20, 1937, and they named her Julia, after sixteenth-century poet Robert Herrick’s divine portrait of Julia, “the queen of flowers,” in The Parliament of Roses to Julia . As a subversive, exalting sensuality in a puritan society, Herrick suited the young couple’s taste. Another of Herrick’s poems, The Bracelet to Julia , spoke to the young mother Decca about new varieties of love:
    I am bound, and fast bound so
That from thee I cannot go
If I co’d, I wo’d not so
    Nanny Blor offered her services (for which the Mitford parents offered to pay), but Esmond vetoed the idea, thinking Blor would bring too much in the way of Mitford family associations. They planned to raise their child without nannies or governesses or any other such minions of British upperclass family life. Esmond himself had hoped to help out more, but he was
the only one working at the time. In any case, as he was “known for his inability to carry a teaspoon from one room to the next,” the principal care and welfare of their baby fell to Decca. Julia quickly became, Decca wrote, “the center of my existence.”
    Decca and Esmond were beginning to feel at home among the brothers and sisters of the Bermondsey Labour Party. Bermondsey was a notable redoubt of radicalism, and its membership “considerably more militant” than that of the official Labour Party. Decca complimented her new neighbors for their “seriousness of purpose.” The Bermondsey mob was also fun to be around. She and Esmond attended lectures and joined in conversations, arguments, and radical sing-alongs, which Decca loved. She loved to harmonize, and she particularly loved to belt out a novelty song. (Noel Coward’s were her favorites.) Despite Britain’s nonintervention policy, which Bermondsey members resented and condemned, they held fund-raisers for Spanish orphans and Jewish refugees from Germany. Decca found the tale of the Bermondsey schoolchildren who had “lined up to boo Princess Mary, symbol of hated charity,” an especially appealing advertisement for her neighborhood. She liked their style.
    So did Esmond. Boadilla had been published in autumn 1937 to good reviews but so-so sales. Still, at nineteen, he had two books under his belt and was confident of his ability to write well and complete his projects quickly. He had plans for a novel, but for the time being settled into work as a copywriter at the advertising agency of Graham and Gillies. Back in Spain, when Esmond had first received his fifty-pound advance for Boadilla , he and Decca had thought they might emigrate to Mexico, a world away from the dismal weather, the loss of Spain, and German aggression. But family life was at least for the moment more like a sanctuary than an exile. For a change, they weren’t running away or under fire, and they didn’t have to justify themselves to anyone. Esmond’s job had its amusements; he was good at jingles and jargon. The New Year looked promising. He was earning enough to support the three of them. Perhaps there was some adjustment necessary now that they were outside the limelight. Naturally, the
neighbors gossiped about the celebrity couple. There were nice cars parked outside from time to time, and well-dressed toffs going into and out of their house. But it was a good life in its almost ordinariness and one he would hardly have predicted for himself.
    Decca, too, was learning the ropes and adapting. It is easy to imagine her out and about, buying the Craven A cigarettes they chain-smoked, a paper from the newsboy on the corner, a chop from a jokey butcher who called her pet or love . Sometimes, the