by Diana Cooper
Sept. 10th. You are at school now, you darling child. I do hope it isn’t too bad and that you are seeing it as an adventure. Anyway you seem to have had the most glorious summer and mind you write an enthusiastically thanking letter to the Paleys. Here there are five or six raids a day. One copes with them fairly well. People say ‘you know there’s a delayed bomb in Montagu Square or Buckingham Palace’ or ‘Lansdowne House has gone – hadn’t you heard?’ One could bear it better if one could see any end to it. Of course it’s there – the end I mean – but one can’t see it yet. Is it the beginning of an invasion scheme or is it just to break our spirit? It won’t do that. The taxi man who took me to Liz’s6 house, the windows of which have gone, said with a grin from ear to ear ‘There’s nothing left of my home. This is nothing.’ I agreed it wasn’t much but I felt as the glass was out I’d better get in and remove anything good she might have left.
You would have laughed to see me and Rex carrying out his clothes individually and stuffing them into Dodgems, scarlet slippers and collars and shiny pumps dropping about and a bouncing billycock and scattering single socks. Liz had only left some lovely linen so I stuffed that into a huge linen basket and put that on to Dodgems’s roof which is slightly rounded so Rex had to hold it steadyish with his crooked stick stuck through a chink of the newly discovered sunshine roof. There was a big row tonight between Papa and me undressing and in different stages of nudity. The gun was banging away outside, and the thuds were hideous to hear and I said we must go down to the basement. I’d always meant to all the day and had taken precautions to stop arguments such as ‘I haven’t got a suitable dressing gown’ by buying him a very suitable inconspicuous navy blue alpaca one with dark red pipings. ‘I think you’re too unkind’ I’d say, pulling off a stocking. ‘We can’t go down, I’m too tired, besides it doesn’t make any difference where you are.’ I was beginning to cry and to give in when the guns gave a particularly violent salvo and the look-out man popped his tin-hatted head in at the door saying excitedly ‘You’re advised to take cover.’ That was a break for me and it settled Papa, who then donned the new robe with the slowness of a tortoise and down we went. I’d arranged with the management that if I did achieve my purpose we could have two rest beds in the Turkish Bath. So there we lay in comfort and in my mind much greater security. There is the nice friendly noise of the dynamo that makes the electric light or the air conditioning or what not that drones on all the time and you hear practically nothing else and I had a wonderful night and feel much better.
Today, Sept. 11th, Ursula came panting in early in the morning, pea-green in the face and utterly whacked, but grinning and cheerful. She is a nurse in Battersea Hospital and has had a gruelling time. She had not been to bed for three nights and the bombs had been clustering round them in their efforts to hit the power station. Last night a delayed action bomb fell beside them so all the patients had to be evacuated to another hospital, and once done she had twenty-four hours to rest. She’s a fine good girl and so is Caroline, who is driving a stretcher ambulance all night and picking up casualties from the seat of the disaster.
September 11th, 1940
Well there it is, my darling little boy, whatever your troubles are in your new world and your new school tie it doesn’t really compare with ours, but I’m praying and trusting that you are coping well. This London front is a bit wearing but we make out as best we can. Papa and I sleep in the Turkish Bath and that is the nicest bit, because the air-conditioning dynamo makes such a nice Enchantress or Clipper noise that you can’t hear the bombs and hardly our own big Hyde Park gun, which once above ground blows your head off. Still, we are all encouraged by its bombast because we feel it’s some kind of answer, and the noise exhilarates. Everybody is exceedingly brave. Caroline drives a stretcher-bearing car and is out in the thick of it. She lunched with me today and I put her on my roofy bed and she slept like a bear in winter all afternoon. She looks so lovely and is so brave that a lump in my throat stops me telling her of my love and admiration.
September 12th. We had raids all day today. Papa and I had to lunch at the Spanish Embassy. I felt there was no choice, although the bombs were an excuse for not attending, but to offset that I felt Englishwomen’s honour was at stake, the Spanish women having risen above dangers for three years. The big restaurant and the grill at the Dorchester where people have eaten since the beginning in, as they thought, relative security have just been discovered by the clients to have glass roofs with nothing above them. So the eaters have now been put into the heart of the ground floor. I have got nothing to grumble about really, still I do a good bit of it. Tomorrow we leave the front line for two days’ rest and I’m looking forward to it madly. What stories I shall have to tell when it’s all over. Nobody who has been through it will listen to me, but you’ll get an earful.
Sept. 13th and a Friday. Invasion seems very probable but on this ugly date both sides can’t be unlucky and we have a stronger hope than they have. It seems fairly certain to come. ‘But when will it bee?’ said the bells of Stepnee. ‘I’m sure I don’t know’ said the Big Bell of Bow. Poor bells, they don’t say it any more. Their tongues are held till the parachutists come, but it’s what they would be saying.
Sept. 15th. It’s in a way worse to watch London from a distance. Always I have felt superstitiously that as long as you keep your eye on something you are keeping it safe. Now that I’m away I imagine it being blown to pieces without my protection. I realise how dreadfully the papers must read over there with one’s imagination to colour the hideous news. When one is in the heart and core of it one is so taken up with getting through with it and holding on and it being less bad perhaps than one feared, that one doesn’t see it as a whole.
It’s your birthday and I can’t send a wire till tomorrow and you will think that I’ve forgotten your entrance into this hard world, and all the happy birthdays we have had. I haven’t really, but things are sometimes disorganised – though wonderfully little considering. Telegrams are one. Everyone telegraphs to ask how their relatives are, and the little offices can’t deal with the flood, so I must wait to get to London and a Western Union. Anyway let’s feel sure that next year can’t be as bad as this and that we shall be together and laughing at past anguish as we light twelve candles.
Sept. 16th. A raid needless to say in progress. I’ve discovered how to find out when one is on, since from a motor car one may well have heard no warning. All the policemen (who now wear tin hats with ‘Police’ written on them) and wardens carry their gas masks on their chests instead of on their backs. In the Dorchester hall they have it written up in large letters, either AIR RAID WARNING or ALL CLEAR.
I had to lunch with Coalbox in the house of cards, and the guns were blazing away and she wanted to go down to the basement, and the guests wouldn’t because they knew they’d be no safer there. H.G. Wells was bawling away about God and Noah and the parlour maid was fixing boards up over the windows. After lunch I tried to do a few jobs but everything shut down and there’s nothing to do but go home and write to you.
Ursula rushed in to say her Battersea Hospital had folded up on her – too many bombs and delayed bombs strewn all around, so the patients were evacuated for good. She’s going straight into St. George’s tomorrow. She’s a good girl. Ministers have been told that the intensive bombing expected for several weeks (!) should alter Ministers’ hours, and meals should be earlier, entrance to their quarters earlier and sleeping underground advised. This order lightens my task. Mr. Bonn the manager now tells me secretly that the Turkish Bath, in which I’d felt as secure as the good earth, was none too safe – nothing much above it – and that he proposed to put six or eight of us into the gymnasium when it’s fixed up. How long will that take? He’s managed to disturb my nights again. When will one learn to think less about one’s own skin? Soon I think, but I’ll always fuss about Papa’s. He is so very foolish, while you I think will look after yourself and really have much more sense.
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nbsp; Sept. 17th. A terrific night of bombardment. A bomb fell in Park Lane not fifty yards away, another blew all the glass out of Berkeley Square. Papa has just gone to the meeting of the House of Commons. There’s a raid on as usual and I’m terribly afraid of the Huns bombing it and getting a rich bag. They have a double warning and on the second one they dodge down to the shelter but Brendan has just told me that the shelter is made of paper. It’s 4.45. Winston should have just begun to make his statement. I do hope he cuts it short.
September 18th, 1940
I hope you are happy. No news yet from Toronto. A nice letter from New York after the World’s Fair. I wonder if they let you do the ‘Parachute Jump’. I fear not. I would have let you, with my new doctrine of ‘Fear nothing’. I wonder too if you did the ‘Bobsled Run’. That I did with Papa and adored it, and he was so appalled and terrified by it. When I think of you in your brave new world I forget for a few moments our struggles here. They are pretty trying. One sleeps very little and that makes one more jumpy than if one felt more rested. At 11 p.m. we go down to our Turkish Bath cubicle and from this underground den the guns are much deadened, but a bomb gives us a good shaking and there’s no more sleep for me. At six the cleaners come in and turn on a blaze of light. ‘That’s good,’ I say, ‘they can’t have hit the power station.’ Sometimes at that hour the lift isn’t working and a long procession of exhausted blear-eyed men and women, weighed down and impeded by armfuls of pillows, eiderdowns, lilos, dogs, water bottles, jewel cases, night conveniences of all kinds, drag their way up flight after flight. It’s eleven flights for us, but we have little paraphernalia, and one is so thankful that another night is past and the sun rising and the sky for the time being free of the enemy.
Thursday September 19th. We are getting so dreadfully tired of the inmates of our hotel; it’s getting fuller and fuller and one must always dine in, as to get home means a shower of shrapnel even if one misses the bombs. Anyone sleeps anywhere. Hutchie and Mary came last night to dine, pyjamas in hand, and dossed down in the lobby of a friend’s suite. The mews that we looked out on when standing at the buffet at weddings in Audley Square7 has been bombed to blazes and I found poor Ursula struggling with two Hungarian maidservants, all the back windows of the house glassless and the basement full of rubble and damage. We got a pantechnicon with great difficulty and parked all the furniture and pictures and rugs and Ursula herself into it, and off to Belvoir.
Friday Sept. 20th. Last night we dined with a lot of Froggies and Madame Curie and M. Palewski, an ex-politician, all violent de Gaullites. The guns and bombs and orchestra and people’s jabber deafen and bewilder, and the more you try to escape the danger and noise of war with light and music and food and wine, the more you think of the East End and the homeless and the fires raging nearby. Comfort we have to find in the argument that only one thing matters – not to be overcome. While the Huns are turning London’s heavens into hell they are not doing much harm to our factories or war production. Therefore unless our resistance breaks, and there is no chance of that, they are wasting their pilots, their ammunition and their confidence.
Meanwhile we try and collect mattresses and pillows and rugs to put into basements for the homeless and the workers, and thousands a day of children and mothers are being got out of London. It seems so absurd that when we got all those congested areas cleared into the country last September we should ever have allowed them to go back to the slums. ‘Couldn’t stop them’ is the answer, I suppose, not without compulsion, and we are so loath to do anything by compulsion. Even now they are unwilling to go, and act very strangely when they get to the outer country. At Mells for instance ten or twenty women arrived at noon. They had been all night in the train, four hours in a church at Frome four miles away during the early morning, and the first thing they asked Katherine was ‘Is there a Lyons8 here?’ When she said ‘No’ they gasped and said ‘What, no Lyons? How often does the bus go to Frome?’ ‘Twice a week’ they were told. Well, believe it or not, no sooner had they swallowed their dinner than half of them walked the four miles back to Frome to get back to streets and see the shops. Another twenty arrived at Daphne Weymouth’s and asked for shelter. Although her house is packed already with evacuated crippled children, she said she would manage somehow and tore off to the local town to buy them blankets and pots and stoves, etc. £8 she spent and when she returned staggering under her load, they’d all gone – vanished and no word left in explanation.
Sat. Sept. 21st. Last evening at five I suddenly thought why should we have a hideous night unnecessarily? Loelia Westminster has a house on the top of a Surrey hill about an hour away from London, and so we buzzed down. It was further than we thought and night fell and we got lost in little lanes filled with fast-moving lightless lorries. At last we were in a wood with soldiers holding shaded lanterns. They asked for our identity cards and there was a general fumble and fluster. I was so happy. Nothing mattered once out of London. The house loomed out of the blackness and we felt in sanctuary and went to bed at eleven and slept till eleven the next morning. Loelia says we can stay if I sleep on a sofa, so Papa has gone up at cockcrow and will come down again this evening. I don’t mind so much not being near in the daytime. It’s the night that I know he will not take cover without me. The day is a blaze of sun and blue. I feel like a child, full of peace and joy. To think that there are two days ahead and two long nights. Of course I don’t say that one can’t hear old Jerry overhead if one wakes, but the smell of the Surrey woods, and the space, and no wounds or gashes to be seen on this very wide landscape, make one feel full of life and love again. Papa came back all right and now it’s Sunday.
September 22nd. I’ve had another long night. I’ve written a letter to Nanny and one to the dear Kat and it’s still pouring with rain, but I wouldn’t mind if it was snowing ink. Anything, anything not to be in London. I don’t think I shall ever want to live there again – never – never. Eve Curie told me that she had been on a tour with Lady Reading to all the provincial A.R.P. shelters. All the little children of five have Micky Mouse gas masks. They love putting them on for drill and at once start trying to kiss each other. Then they all march into their shelter and sing ‘There’ll always be an England’.
September 23rd. Back again in London, to find our Ministry has been repeatedly hit last night. We motored up in the early a.m. all dew and sun and peace, and now the siren has gone and everything is hideous again.
September 29th, 1940
I couldn’t keep up my daily letter this week. Things have been too disturbed – too many sirens, too much noise, no possibility of concentration. Now I’m relatively out of harm’s way and will try to remember what happened. We were anxious and fretful about Dakar.9 It was a big failure and we must make the best of it. Poor de Gaulle is a smirched flag, but perhaps we can hoist him again. If you look from my top window at the Dorchester you can’t see anything wrong with our London, but walking in the streets is more melancholy. 90 Gower Street is no more. Papa says it’s thoroughly gutted. I won’t go and look. It would make me too sad. Buck’s Club also was said to have ‘gone’ but is mendable. John Lewis and D.H. Evans and Peter Robinson are burnt out. There’s a big gap in Dover Street through to Albemarle Street.
The East End is beyond anything – quite demolished. A good thing if it wasn’t for the sad inhabitants. We are getting basements going in the West End for them and the people in the ministries now sleep where they work – three nights a week they work almost double hours and after three days go home for three workless ones. This means less danger for them getting to and fro, fewer hours wasted in shelters and less congestion on the buses and undergrounds which are now public shelters at night. Families go in at about five with bedding, babies, buns and bottles and settle down to community singing, gossip, making new friends, exchanging bomb stories. I should rather like it together, but can you imagine Papa’s reaction if he had to join the party?
There is a nice story being told this week of a l
etter coming from an English prisoner in Germany. It said ‘I am having a wonderful time here. The prison is most comfortable, not to say luxurious, the food is excellent and plentiful. We are treated with every consideration and kindness. I should like you to tell all my friends that and the Forces too. Tell the Army, tell the Navy and R.A.F. and above all tell the Marines.’
All my supports are leaving. Jimmy Sheean has gone. H.G. Wells has flown to America. Somerset Maugham does the same tomorrow. We had our first night in the reconstructed gymnasium this week – eight nice little beds behind screens, all the camels and horses and bicycles and rowing apparatus removed. Unfortunately it has a hollow wood uncarpeted floor and three swing doors with catches on them, and the room is treated like a passage. I never got a wink, but Papa was the proverbial log and had sheets and a table and a lamp. No one else had a lamp. The next night a great improvement took place – a carpet to muffle the many fewer footsteps. Conversations are conducted in whispers that take me straight back to childhood and to you. Sir George Clark asking Major Cazalet if he knows what the time is etc. No one snores. If Papa makes a sound I’m up in a flash and rearrange his position. Perhaps Lady Halifax is doing the same to His Lordship.10
Between 6 and 6.30 a.m. we start getting up one by one. We wait till they have all gone. They each have a flashlight to find their slippers with and I see their monstrous profiles projected caricaturishly on the ceiling, magic-lantern-wise. Lord Halifax is unmistakable. We never actually meet. It’s certainly more pally in the underground. Nothing seems disorganised, and in shops and in food there seems to be no difference at all. Taxis and cars are everywhere. Tin hats are like jewels, but they’ll be purchasable soon. Mine (stolen last week) has been returned. Bertram11 is brave as a lion and is loved by all beautiful women and sensible men. They have put up a plaque in St. Paul’s to an American called Fish who was killed fighting in the R.A.F. It says ‘To an American citizen who gave his life that England might live’ or something like that. I thought it so moving.
