by Diana Cooper
There are two schools of thought in England about the invader’s reception – shall every man and woman shoot to kill and poison and trap and snipe and stab in sleep every Hun they come across, or shall only the Army and the Home Guard deal death? I’m for the former method of ending the war, though whether my courage would stand up till the end I can’t think. I think the majority think my way. Another poor airman falling in a home ditch found an old woman with a scythe bearing down on him – Dame Death no less.
August 15th. Lunched with Oggie,39 where I saw Cecil Beaton just down from a north-eastern town where he’d been photographing. He was sent there as being one of the towns most harassed. He was surprised to find how little damage there was – only two-storey houses that crumple and crumble into such fine debris that wonderfully few people are hurt even if they fall upon them. No military objectives, no big buildings. He’d been too to see the patients in hospital and moved me to tears by telling of their fortitude and cheerfulness. One poor woman had had her daughter killed and was rather badly hurt herself. She started to talk of it to Cecil, and the nurse said ‘No, Mrs Brown, you know you mustn’t think about it.’ ‘No, I know I mustn’t,’ she said and changed the subject. Everyone is self-disciplined and even sorrow is checked.
I took Bloggs40 and the farmer41 and Katherine Asquith to Thunder Rock.42 It’s the fourth time I have seen it. Tell Kaetchen – he will laugh at me as I have so often laughed at him for the same idiocy. That was yesterday. This evening was quite another picnic. At 7.30 the farmer and I were sitting in my room talking about a course of guerrilla warfare he is to take next week at [censored]. (Too funny thinking of Conrad on all fours in a ditch or dropping sugar into petrol tanks when not observed) when he said ‘There goes the raid warning.’ Some people, though sharp-eared, can’t hear a bat – it is out of their ear’s register. I have that peculiarity when it comes to air raid warnings. I took his word for it and down we went to the lounge. I fetched out the dispatch case with the diamond dolphins and trembling diamond spray and other precious stones and essential papers and passports, £200, powder, rouge, brows and lashes, a comb – but forgot book, knitting, gas mask and tin hat. It didn’t matter because it only lasted a quarter of an hour, but I was ashamed of my lack of method. The lounge was full of quite gay43 people ordering tea and cigarettes. A few streetsters came in and many freaks came out of their rooms for the first time. Even the elevator boys said they had never taken them up. I suppose some went to the shelter below but I think very few. Wadey was in her element, all smiles, and went up first to the roof before taking to the cellars. When we all got back to our eighth floor Wadey pointed out an enormous column of black smoke about ten miles away. I don’t know yet what it was.
This raid happened on a day when I could almost have welcomed a bomb to destroy me utterly, because at five minutes to midnight I had said, to please Desmond MacCarthy44, that I would broadcast in a programme called And So To Bed in which people read and comment upon a favourite verse or piece of prose. I settled that I would give them the Battle Hymn of the Republic. It pleased my own American complex of love. I thought twenty lines and the five verses would last five minutes all right. Papa wouldn’t or couldn’t help me so I sweated in blood to put the twenty lines together. When at last I thought it could go at that, I found that reading slowly it took just two minutes. I tore off to the shutting London Library and got a life of the authoress and against time dug out of the two fat volumes two episodes that I hoped would pass muster. At 11.45 I was at the B.B.C. with my pathetic script rustling in my moist hands. No sooner had I got to my studio on the third floor than there was what is called a ‘purple light’ – almost the red which means ‘take cover’ – so down we went to the basement studios. I swear to you that I was longing for the purple to turn red, in the belief that such trivial talks as mine would give way before Government directions. The light didn’t change, so I was for it. I can’t tell you how it went – I think not badly, anyway I made no boggle or splutter, and my tongue though too big for my mouth did not twist.
Papa listening at home said it was all right, but Wadey asked me what programme I’d been on. I told her and she said she’d listened to the news at 12 but she hadn’t heard me. I said she must have. She said no. She’d heard a woman talking about the war but it wasn’t me. I let it go, but of course it was me but I suppose the old rasp was quite unrecognisable – all to the good.
August 16th. The column of smoke was, they say, a scent factory – somebody’s Lavender Water. Good, I say, but not so good if one thinks that some of the sensational conflagrations our airmen see as a result of a successful bomb on German soil may be eau de cologne only. I went to see a man at the Ministry about getting some rooms in the actual building for me and Duff to live in when he said ‘I’m afraid that’s the warning.’ I began to be frightened for my hearing – again I was aware of nothing. The whole million souls who occupy the M. of I. all trooped down to the basement, where the big boys conduct business as usual. One dreads, curiously enough, once reasonably safe, not bombs but boredom, and the fear that it may last four or five hours. There were tin-hatted decontaminators, Red Cross nurses, fire-fighters, all grades of A.R.P. Papa was sitting in a soundproof room with his big shots around him and fifty telephones and maps and signals and lamps and gadgets. He might have been conducting a war from G.H.Q.
I got some friends to talk to and was jabbering away when a male voice shouted ‘Quiet please.’ Silence followed, and then ‘All firemen upstairs.’ Of course I thought the bomb had hit us. Next order after the jabbering was again quieted was ‘This passage to be kept clear for Red Cross ambulances.’ Corpses next, I thought, but it was the All Clear next, thank God, and so far no news of anything dropped.
The M. of I. has put out a new short film to encourage the sale of War Savings Certificates and you will be glad to hear that the cast consists of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsbottom and young Albert.45 Albert sells everything he’s got including his beloved stick with the ’orse’s ’ead ’andle to buy savings certificates, and then he gets so bitten with the idea that he sells his father’s ‘smoking set’ and the stuffed birds from the parlour. Stanley Holloway says the words and you never see Albert’s face actually; only the back of him is shown and very unlovable he looks.
7.30 same day. Just had our second raid warning today. It’s most tedious but I’ll get used to it. This time I happened to be in Chapel Street so I dropped into No. 3446 and joined Daisy and Claud Russell and three foreigners – nationalities indistinct – in our passage shelter. Daisy has filled it with green linen mattresses. It looked like a little Arabian room and we sat cross-legged and smoked and ate chocolates. We were there about an hour and it was wearisome in the extreme. Londoners will get used to it like the people in Dover have, and when they do life will just go on as though nothing were happening, but the orders of taking cover have been so drummed into us law-abiders that we suffer the ghastly waste of time and acute boredom to boot.
August 17th. I went to see poor shrivelling shrinking shaking Mumble at Rottingdean today. I took my tin hat along. The high white cliffs are bristling with guns. I can’t see how even the Huns are to scale that height of chalk. I fully expected some excitement but got none and saw nothing. I found myself unwilling to hang about the stations, so made a bolt in and out of trains. The thought of the glass roof falling on one is so unpleasant.
No fighting today. I think it’s a shade ominous, but the general spirit here is one of victory and Londoners seem pleased to have received their baptism of bombs. The provincials and bumpkins can’t jeer at us for being scrimshankers in cotton wool any more. Papa broadcast this evening. I couldn’t hear it because I had a dinner party downstairs here, thirty-two-strong, for overseas officers. I took my little receiving set to hold to my ear, but Ursula47 put it out of action by dropping it within five seconds of my asking her to hold it. The overseas high-grade officers had a great time. I got lovely women and famous men to meet them and we are t
o do it twice a week and have different hosts and hostess at each, but it’s quite exhausting.
I read this letter to Papa and he says you won’t understand one word of it. He got me so discouraged that I thought I’d tear the damned thing up, but I don’t think it’s so obscure and Kaetchen can help deciphering and explaining.
August 18th. Two air raid warnings today, but we rose above them and sat lunching in the Chapel Street garden for the first one and did not leave our roof sitting room for the second. There’s a completely demolished house with only its garden gate intact. The owner had stuck a collection box on it with a sign saying Fund for Spitfires.
August 20th, 1940
I enclose my broadcast, not that I’m in any way proud of it but that I like you to know as much as possible what I am doing so that we may not lose touch with one another. It’s so easy with a waste of seas between us. Space makes faces and memories dim as well as time. Please to remember this and not forget me when you are in Canada and if you were as Scotch as your grandmother you could say this poem. The author is unknown and it’s lovely, I think, and bad Beaverbrook’s favourite:
From the low sheiling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a waste of seas
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.48
22nd and 23rd were days of maddening internee trouble.49 All my time and all my patience get exhausted. I suppose, if I live, a harvest will be reaped one day. Papa and I are like slum children about going away for a weekend. It’s about two months since we saw the country (I don’t count the Mumble visits). Tomorrow we actually go to Lavington.50 I believe it’s a curtain of fire but heavens we’re all so brave these days.
24th. Big day. It’s the hols! It opened with a bang or rather with a siren shrieking its soul out like a baffled banshee. That didn’t last long and at eleven we were off in Dodgems, who’s taken on a new and speedy lease of life since I spent 17/6 on her. England looked most lovely. Every child seemed to look like you to my hungry eye, corn being lifted, trees and hedges heavy with fruit and berries, dahlias and hot-coloured flowers, bees and flowerpots – no country for vile invaders’ feet.
Once at Lavington one might as well be in a hive. The planes (nationality always unknown) buzz around one like bees. Very high though tiny silver midges that one wouldn’t see in peacetime because one wouldn’t peer so hard. After lunch Papa and I set off for West House.51 A raid was on but then it always is. The first thing I saw grinning like a jackass was Mr. Uncles.52 He genuinely felt you were missing something. ‘Wouldn’t John just love it,’ he said about forty times. ‘There’s a German plane lying at Rose Green and another in Pagham harbour. They haven’t dared go near ’em for fear of delayed action bombs. The dead Germans are still lying there. Smell something frightful they do. Wouldn’t John just love it?’ I felt he was right because anything that makes me feel sickish you like so much.
Then we went on to the house. We found it undamaged by soldiers, but O the Prom!53 It’s a fortress. It’s Carcassonne. I suppose there are forty blocks of concrete about four feet square and five feet high almost meeting right along, with just room for a gun between each. It seems to be the only part of the coast really fortified. I was alarmed, but impressed and proud rather. Mr. Uncles must get it photographed for me to send you. The Joneses were being themselves, dreamy and pleasant. They are like Adam and Eve, I think, splendid gardeners and loving of each other but they have learnt nothing of the past or progress or science. They’d never seen electric light or a tap when they came to us, and he looked aghast when we asked him if he had a Kodak or if he knew of anyone who had. I might have asked him if he’d got a gyroscope on him from his expression.
Like you, drawn rather to the horror of the smell of dead Germans, we thought we’d go and look for them in Pagham harbour. When I say we – Papa dragged behind like a tired donkey – we walked along the dykes round the water. It looked so beautiful and desolate and untouched by human hand, no stacks, no cars or cottages, only reeds and gulls and tough grass. The All Clear siren rent the air and wailed off, adding to the idea of peace and purity. Suddenly we found the broken monster. No dead Germans, only a sad torn sock to show that men had brought it to this quiet field. Contorted and twisted, not a bone intact, it looked more like a mutilated brontosaurus than a super-modern weapon of death. Back to supper and bed, and a night punctuated by guns and bombs, none of which I heard, thank God.
25th. At crack of dawn Barbie and I stocked up the mobile canteen with forty dozen cakes, matches, cigs, tea, lemonade and Wrigley’s54 and stamps, stationery, and soap – and bumped off very slowly to the airfield [Tangmere]. I was a bit nervous but didn’t show it, and when I saw it my heart stopped. It is conceded that it has had a ‘dusting’ from the enemy. Not one hangar has missed that duster, and when a hangar gets an explosion of course it looks far worse than a house. It’s large and thin and empty with no floors or thickness or beams or concrete, and it just caves in. Well! The place was a shambles, but yet it has made absolutely no difference to the working of the aerodrome. The planes were of course not in the hangars and they lost a few, a very few testing bombers, and surprisingly few people, and they were all as perky and gay as be damned. It’s great fun, the mobile canteen. I should dearly love to live at Lavington and do it daily but we know that I can’t desert Mr. Micawber. You bump round from group to isolated group; as they see you coming thirty men rush at you as they would for the last bus and fall on the tea and doughnuts and cigarettes. These are the ‘few’ that many are so grateful to.
At one outpost the loudspeaker suddenly blared out something. I feared it would be ‘Enemy aircraft above’ but instead it was the new awards given to that squadron for valour, endurance, courage, wisdom and the rest of it. I liked hearing that so much. They cheered from their hearts and guts. I must say that with aircraft perpetually swooping down and taking off, etc. and with perpetual appalling explosions due to dynamiting the damaged hangars, one was perpetually in and out of one’s skin. Billy Wallace was on the field with the canteen for the dusting. They popped him into a trench and put a board over him and there he stayed crouched for an hour. They all think the work dreadfully tiring but compared to my London Y.M.C.A. it’s a rest cure and fun and beautiful and out of doors, and no jam or egg or marge or knives to scrape and clean.
That night the Wing Commander C.O. of three squadrons came to dinner. He is known as the ‘Phizzer’ and a phizzer he was. I like him awfully – complete confidence in the world, the war and himself, but no side or swank – that’s a great combination. One of his squadrons had brought down seventeen that afternoon with loss of one, the squadron leader himself who with a shattered wing rammed into a Messerschmitt and into certain death. After dinner the butler came in to say a raid was on as usual and also a gas alert. ‘What do we do now?’ was everyone’s question, so no one did anything. Bombs fell in the distance but I need hardly say I didn’t hear them. Surreptitiously I slid out of the house and groped my way in total blackout to Dodgems where I sneaked the gas masks out. Wadey had fastened the most inappropriate pink chiffon flower on to mine to distinguish it from Papa’s. No more was heard of the gas. Rumour had it that it was coming in from the sea. This sounded too fantastic to swallow, so to bed we went.
August 26th. I motored up alone and when I got to Cobham the policeman stopped me and said ‘There’s a raid on, you know’ (I needn’t tell you that I hadn’t heard the warning). ‘What do I do?’ I said. ‘Optional – you can proceed if desired or take shelter fifteen yards ahead in the public shelter.’ I was torn between wanting to see a public shelter so as to tell you about it, and not wanting to be late for a quiet lunch with Papa in our room, so that he might have a siesta afterwards. He sleeps so badly, not of course because of bombs but because of his office and his scurvy critics.
You will be proud to hear that the old funk ‘proceeded’ in her muslin dress, with now a tin hat a
dded, and Dodgems had the road practically to herself. I ran out of the raid at Kingston. One knows a raid is on by the fact that the traffic almost stops and everybody is out of their house Johnny-head-in-airing. When the All Clear goes, back they go to their dinners and off puff the cars again. We got through the afternoon all right but of course in the middle of dinner it all began again. I was dining with Coalbox and about ten other distinguished guests. The servants are sent to the basement and the guests serve the food. The raid got quite forgotten. It reminded me of an old friend of mine, long dead, called Harry Cust.55 He was having a men’s dinner, Bernard Shaw was there, and H.G. Wells. His house caught fire. The engines arrived and soused the house. Dinner went on. They sent for bath towels to put round their necks against the drip from the upper floors. The house burnt merrily. H.G. said ‘Where’s your fiddle, Harry?’ It’s all told in one of Wells’s books, The New Machiavelli I think.
