by Diana Cooper
It did indeed. That branch was, moreover, forked: syphilis and piles. Within a short time my grandfather and grandmother together were said to know more about the private parts of the British aristocracy than any other couple in the country. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – he quickly made his name in London society, becoming a member of all the right clubs and an ever-popular guest at dinner parties, country houses and even on grouse moors. Among his patients he numbered Edward, Prince of Wales, whom in 1874 he accompanied to St Petersburg. (From which of the above two distressing complaints His Royal Highness suffered is not known; the Palace announced at the time that Dr Cooper was treating him for a form of bronchitis – but what else could the Palace have said?) The two remained friends, and in 1901, when the prince succeeded his mother on the throne and became King Edward VII, he was to award my grandfather a knighthood in his Coronation Honours.
Dr Cooper had done well: well enough to send his only son Duff3 – there were also three daughters – to Eton and Oxford where, according to his biographer John Charmley, ‘he trailed clouds of dissipation’, drinking, gambling and pursuing regiments of women, whom he wooed – on the whole successfully – not only by his charm and wit but also by bombarding them with sonnets, for which he had a quite extraordinary facility. These were a by-product of a genuine passion for literature, in particular poetry and nineteenth-century novels in both English and French; by the end of his life it was almost impossible to find one of these that he had not read and remembered.
After the war he did indeed give up the Foreign Office, embarking instead on a political career, in the course of which he became Secretary of State for War in 1936 and First Lord of the Admiralty – effectively Secretary of State for the Navy – in 1937. He loved the latter post, which included the use of the Admiralty yacht, a converted destroyer called HMS Enchantress; but he did not enjoy it for long. At the end of August 1938 Nazi troops had begun to mass along Germany’s frontier with Czechoslovakia. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax were prepared to see the destruction of what Chamberlain famously described as ‘a far-away country’ and ‘people of whom we know nothing’; my father took a stronger line. He wanted us to make it absolutely clear to Hitler that if he marched into Czechoslovakia the result would be war. At first, he wrote, the alternatives seemed to be 1) peace with dishonour – allowing Hitler to take over Czechoslovakia; 2) war. But then Chamberlain made three flights to Germany to see Hitler; and when he returned after their last meeting, having accepted virtually all Hitler’s demands, my father saw that there was now a third possibility staring us in the face: war with dishonour – betraying Czechoslovakia and still having to fight, since Hitler was clearly not going to be satisfied. He could bear it no longer, and on 1 October submitted his resignation.
This, then, is the background to the letters that follow. They were written over a thirteen-year period, between 1939 and 1952. When I received the first I had recently celebrated my tenth birthday; the last found me a married man with a child of my own on the way, soon to be twenty-three and to enter the Foreign Service myself. For both my mother and me, these were eventful years. Their beginning virtually coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War. For her, this was followed by a lecture tour that my father undertook in America, the London Blitz, the establishment of a smallholding farm in Sussex, a five-month posting to Singapore involving extensive tours of South-East Asia, nine months with General de Gaulle in Algiers, three years at the British Embassy in post-liberation Paris and, finally, retirement in a house just outside Chantilly. For me, they saw my evacuation in 1940 to the United States, eighteen months’ education in Toronto, a return to England in 1942 on a Royal Navy cruiser, four years at Eton, two on the lower deck of the Navy and, to finish off, three years at New College, Oxford.
During that time, my mother wrote me several hundred letters, sometimes daily, hardly ever less frequently than two or three times a week. Despite repeated injunctions to keep them carefully, I fear that the very occasional bundle has been lost – almost certainly my fault. One particularly sad casualty is that which concludes the American lecture tour in the very first chapter. But the vast majority – at least 90 per cent – have survived, and it is the best of these that you now hold in your hands. They have in some cases been slightly abridged, but only to spare the reader those paragraphs which would have bored him or her stiff, or which I myself, after so long an interval, find incomprehensible. There are, alas, far too many names. Most of them are identified in the footnotes or – also by Christian names and nicknames – in the List of Names at the end of the book. Of those which are not, some are made sufficiently clear by the context, others are too well-known to need additional explanation. The remainder are left unexplained because I have no idea who they are.
Particularly during the early years, I was a far less dutiful correspondent than she – and, as her letters make abundantly clear, she never let me forget it. (‘This one only told me that your gym master had been ill.’) Increasing maturity showed a welcome improvement, and by the time I reached the Navy and had a good deal of time on my hands I was writing regularly, sometimes at inordinate length. The results you have been spared; but, simply to give a taste of the two-way correspondence, one of my own letters, ruthlessly abridged, has been included as a sort of prelude to each chapter, to be ignored at will.
* * *
1 There have long been persistent rumours that another recipient of Mr Cust’s attentions was a member of the domestic staff at Belton who later became the maternal grandmother of Lady Thatcher, and that our former Prime Minister is consequently my first cousin. I should dearly love to know, but have never had the courage to suggest DNA.
2 Duff Cooper, Diaries.
3 In later years the press tended to give him (and my mother) a hyphen, making ‘Duff’ part of the surname. This was unwarranted: he was christened Duff, his mother’s family name. It was never my mother’s and has never been mine.
1
‘Pray for Hitler’s sharks not to catch us’
USA, OCTOBER 1939–FEBRUARY 1940
Westbury Manor1
Brackley
Northants
February 2nd, 1940
My darling Mummy and Papa,
We are not snowed up any more, I am glad to say, but there is still a lot about.
The new music teacher, who plays the organ in church, is very nice. I have her twice a week, for half an hour, and am getting on fine.
We had films last night. One was about owls, hawks and things. It was frightfully good, showing hawks in midair, catching bones. Film No. 2 was pure humour but it kept going wrong. It was a maid who dropped all the best china, and it came to life and tortured her. I did not like it and you would have loathed it.
The master, Mr. Clinch, is an owner of performing fleas. We are going to have a demonstration this afternoon. He is also going to try to get a scout troop, and is teaching us many knots. Still, to go on with fleas. They are called performing livestock, since ‘fleas’ sounds too undignified. They are called Oscar and Cuthbert, and Mr. Clinch got them from the Sahara Desert.
I now know about thirty verses from Horatius.2 When I have learned it all, you will owe me £3 10s, since there are seventy verses.
Lots and lots of love,
John Julius
HAVING RESIGNED FROM the Chamberlain government in October 1938, my father found himself at a loose end. When, therefore, towards the end of the year, he was invited to lecture in America, he did not turn the suggestion down flat. He replied that given the existing situation he could not possibly commit himself at that time; he might, however, be able to do so in the following year, ‘if conditions were favourable’. He was in fact fairly certain that they would not be; but the inactivity that had continued month after month in 1939 had proved almost more than he could stand. War was declared on 3 September 1939. He knew there was no hope for a ministerial post while Neville Chamberlain
remained in power; at the same time he did not feel that he could leave England without the Prime Minister’s approval. On 21 September he managed an interview; but, as he noted in his diary, ‘Chamberlain merely suggested that in six weeks’ time, when “things will be getting pretty hot here”, a man of my age might be criticised for leaving the country. I said that that was my own responsibility and was a question that I could settle for myself. After some humming and hawing he said that it would be a good thing for me to go – and so I left him. I wasn’t with him for more than ten minutes and I left with a feeling of intensified dislike.’
His mission, if he went, would be clear enough. He must do his best to persuade America that the isolationist policies then being advocated by Colonel Charles Lindbergh – and a good many others in high places – would prove disastrous to both our countries. The cause of Great Britain was not everywhere popular in the United States. There was in particular a deep suspicion of the Empire; not 1 per cent of his audiences, wrote my father, believed that the Dominions were really self-governing; nor did they have any idea of the bloodshed that was bound to follow a British withdrawal from India, which most of them wholeheartedly advocated. Above all, they had to be made to understand that the western world was fighting for its life. Without American help, the battle might well be lost.
He decided to go; my mother, as she always did, went with him; and the letters begin.
In the train to Southampton
October 12th, 1939
Papa and I have barged and battered our way through a mob of passengers and seers-off and are at last seated (not everybody is) in a Pullman car with eggs and strawberry jam. There was a crowd of photographers hunting Papa like sleuths, but I implored them not to take us as we don’t want the enemy to send a special torpedo. We gave a party last night at the Savoy and tried to forget we were going, not that I mind much except for leaving you. I’ll write, no cable you as soon as I arrive in N.Y. but I don’t suppose it will be for ten or twelve days. Work hard, play hard and don’t change till I come back anyway. Be just as I left you, gay and brave and good and sensible. Don’t forget that there’s a war being fought and that it’s got to be won and that your contribution towards winning it is to be better, more hardworking, more thoughtful and braver than usual . . . I love you very much.
S.S. Manhattan
Halfway over
The sea is rather Cape Wrathish3 and I have forgotten the terror of the torpedoes in my efforts to cope with standing upright. Everybody except Papa and me is sleeping five and six in a cabin on cots like you slept on in the Enchantress and all the big saloons are dormitories of fifty unfortunates all sicking together. We have a film every afternoon and we have to go and sit on our places two hours before it starts. The news that you will delight in is that we shall actually see the World’s Fair.4 I’ll send you pictures and details. The deck is black with children which makes me want you very much. They play a nice dart game on deck which I’ll send you for Christmas if I can get it over.
We get very little English news. What comes through is on a radio at its most confused and raucous worst. I’m trying to remember what Belvoir was like when I was half your age, with no taps, no electric light, no motors, but instead lamp-men and water-men carrying gigantic cans. Drives in the afternoon with Grandpapa in a big landau with a big fat coachman on the box driving a pair of spanking horses and a footman in a long coat and top hat who leapt down and opened a gate and scrambled up to the box again and did nothing else in life. If I can put it all together and make it interesting enough I might make a radio talk in America, and make some money to give to the Red Cross. I’ll stop now and add a bit more to this letter before we land.
Saturday. We are due to land tomorrow. It got lovely and calm again yesterday and there was a good film called Stanley and Livingstone5 and in the evening we gave a dinner party of two other people . . .
Shall hope to see old Kaetchen at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning. I shall be happy to arrive, the perils of the sea behind us for a bit. I shall be thinking about you all the time and longing for letters, nothing too silly to tell me about, remember that as I shall be hungry for news of you – air raid warnings, outings with Nanny.
October 27th, 1939
New York
I’ve been to the World’s Fair for the first time – not, you will be sorry to hear, to the Amusement Park. I go there tomorrow, but I’ve been inside the Perisphere. It’s that large globe one sees in the pictures. One goes in the door at the foot of the pyramid and there’s a blue-lit, rather sinister moving staircase which shoots you off into the inside of the globe on to a revolving platform that carries you round the circle while you look down upon the city of the future – done like panoramas are done. The dome above you looks just like the real sky and changes to night and stars and the model city lights up. I did the English Pavilion – good but dull – and the French one – good and exciting – and the Russian one, immense and made of marble and showing with tremendous pride things the U.S.S.R. has made and invented and developed since their new regime – all the things we’ve had for years, such as an underground railway. The Exhibition doesn’t look half as lovely as the Paris one – fountains much less good, but one doesn’t get so tired as there are little motors and little chairs a man pushes you in. I saw too a room of minute babies in incubators. That was fascinating, and you would have very much liked the Palace of Health, with transparent men with pulsating kidneys and brains, etc. I’ll write you about the Amusements next time.
It seems dreadful being so far from you and the family and unhappy England. No news from anyone yet, only stories of Germany’s hatred of England. It makes one desperately sad. Here the cry is ‘Keep out of the war’. A few years ago America passed a law called the Neutrality Act which meant that they might not sell any armaments or aeroplanes or oil or steel to countries that were at war. Now there is a big fight going on because Roosevelt, the President, wants to repeal that law, to tear it up and allow any nation at war to buy what they want, as long as they can fetch it in their own ships and pay cash down for it. (‘Cash and Carry’ it’s called.) He wants this because he is very pro-England and France, and he knows that the repeal of the law would advantage us, who have ships and money and the command of the seas. So we must pray that the President pulls it off, and now you know what the Repeal of the Neutrality Act is, or you ought to if you’re not a tiny idiot or if I am incapable of making myself clear. We are going to Washington next week and I hope to see my darling President in his White House.
Goodbye, my beloved. Don’t forget to say your prayers at night under the clothes – you needn’t kneel if the other boys don’t, but say them please.
British Embassy
Washington D.C.
November 3rd, 1939
You will be very sorry to hear that I never again got to the Fair. I’d promised myself two days – the last two before the Fair closed – to do all the parachutes and heart-stoppers. And on those two days the heavens opened and torrential rains that drowned everything, and now it’s shut till next year and it’s just too bad. We came to Washington D.C. yesterday to see our Ambassador there, Lord Lothian, and this evening – great excitement – we are to go to the White House and see the President, so I won’t finish this letter till later so that I can tell you what he is like. I’ve always loved him as you know, but he is unpopular with the very rich because he taxes them mercilessly and a good job too. He’s very pro-Ally and does not really think that America should be an ‘isolationist’ country that takes no part in the rest of the world’s troubles. He would like to come to our help and has already done so by getting the Neutrality Law repealed (it was done yesterday just as we arrived, by a big majority of votes). So now we can buy all the arms we can pay for from the U.S.A. and so can France, and Hitler won’t like it one little bit. That will do for my lecture bit of this letter.
Papa makes his first lecture next Monday at Columbia University – that’s New York – and three days lat
er he makes one in New Jumper – I mean New Jersey, which is the next state. Papa has gone very American – he has given up carrying a stick or umbrella, he is very energetic and full of hustle as though he thought ‘time was money’. He speaks through his nose and soon he will be wearing pince-nezes and smoking a cheroot, and may even grow a little goatee beard. I’m going out now to the Capitol and to look at a colossal Abraham Lincoln made of marble sitting in a chair. I pray every night that you are happy and well. By the time you get this there will be only about three weeks more of school. Perhaps you’ll be preparing a play. I haven’t heard a word of you yet.
Saturday 4th. Well, the White House was a big success. Mr. President was gleeful over his repeal and didn’t pretend to be neutral at all. I was a bit nervous and didn’t do very well with him, but he did very well with me. If his legs had not been paralysed he’d have danced a war dance. Before the tea with the President we went to see the Hoover Institute of Criminal Investigation.6 You would so have loved it. When the gangsters and racketeers were at their worst and the kidnappers, Mr. Hoover was put in charge of the Police Department and made the ‘G-men’. (G stands for Government.) They are a severely trained body of men who know the law, who are husky and strong, and who are taught to shoot straight and carry guns. The result has been miraculous. The headquarters are at Washington and there you can see all the relics of the gangsters, their blood-stained bits, their death masks, their sawn-off shotguns, notes written by kidnapped children, millions of indexed fingerprints. To finish up you are taken to the shooting gallery where you are first shown how the different kinds of machine-guns and repeaters of all sorts are operated with tracer bullets that show in the dark, and then you can try them yourself on the target of a life-sized man. I did pretty well and kept my riddled man for you. I’ll send it if I can.
