Darling Monster

by Diana Cooper

  32 Major allied advances in North Africa.

  33 My parents’ bed at the Admiralty was supported on gilded dolphins.

  34 Kaetchen.

  35 A city on the Libyan coast, heavily defended by the Italians. The city had fallen to the Australians – their first battle of the Second World War – on 4 January.

  36 My father had written me a letter which arrived so cut up by the wartime censor that it looked like lace. I sent it back to my parents to show them. As Minister of Information, he was responsible for all censorship at the time.

  4

  ‘A happy Easter, dear egg’

  BOGNOR, FEBRUARY–JULY 1941

  Upper Canada College Prep School

  March 9th, 1941

  My darling Mummy and Papa,

  I don’t know whether I have told you or not, but Fara’s1 flat is full of pets. There is one white rat, two mice, a turtle and a bowl of goldfish. Anyhow, the poor things had been starved over the weekend and the rat had got out, eaten the turtle and most of Fara’s hat. We usually kept him in with a bit of wire netting over the top of his bowl and The Last of the Mohicans on top of that, but now we find that The Last of the Mohicans is too light, and he can get out, so now we use Gone with the Wind . . .

  Now we have left off carpentry and are doing art. I am drawing a beautiful Surrealistic for a play which the form is doing at the end of term, and I am awfully proud of it as it is the best Surrealistic I have ever done. Of course, now I have been told how to do them roughly by the master.

  Lots and lots of love,

  John Julius

  THE EARLY SUMMER of 1941 and the two long summers of 1942 and ’43 were, my mother used to say, the happiest time of her life. Serving in canteens, doling out gas masks and making camouflage nets were all very well, but she had now decided that the cultivation of our pathetically few acres of Sussex – about four – while raising as many farm animals as she could, would be a far more useful contribution to the war effort. She had no knowledge of agriculture or husbandry, but she learned fast, relying on innumerable pamphlets from the Ministry of Agriculture and the expert advice of her devoted Conrad Russell. This tall, slow-moving, slow-speaking bachelor with his thatch of thick white hair – the Gothic Farmer, she used to call him – had run his own farm in Somerset for a quarter of a century and had practical experience of everything she needed to know. Having loved her for ten years but being, like her, perfectly content that their relationship should remain platonic, he would come to Bognor for two or three nights a week and would advise on the growing of cabbages or kale, on milking and cheese-making, on the proper composition of poultry meal or pig swill. There would be a cheese made every other day, Cheddar alternating with Pont-l’Evêque.

  She had no helper except Conrad on his visits and me when I was there. Jones the gardener – now in his late sixties – rallied only if summoned in a crisis, and her old maid Miss Wade concerned herself exclusively with the chickens and ducks. Our one remaining family of evacuees from the East End of London were of no use at all; the country frightened them so much that they hardly ever left the house. My father meanwhile was still a distinctly reluctant Minister of Information, commuting daily to London and – except on those occasions when he was obliged to stay at the Dorchester for the night – returning in time for dinner.

  Bognor, April 10th, 1941

  I have to do all the marketing as there is no more delivering. I enjoy it enormously, not that there is any choosing and no pinching of chickens’ breasts, no picking out brown eggs, or settling which biscuits to buy. You just take what you are given and like it, but there’s the big excitement of suddenly seeing a bunch of leeks or some mushrooms and falling – no, pouncing – upon the find. Mr. Parfrement2 sold me his old hen house for 30/- and said ‘I hope you’ll give me all the patronage you can. I can supply any fish you want as well as meat and poultry.’ ‘I always do, Mr. Parfrement’ I said. ‘I notice that you had a parcel from Ragler’s in your car’, he said. I went as scarlet as a turkey cock and mumbled something about it not happening again.

  Conrad came down and together we made a cheese of cow’s milk. It’s a fascinating occupation and takes hours of standing with your arms deeply plunged into ever-warming curds and whey. It is so winter cold that I was grateful for the heat, and we put the whey into a dear little press and made a most professional-looking little cheese. Holbrook’s3 pantry is the dairy and I hope to make about sixty cheeses as a contribution to next winter’s food, but it’s the goats that evade me. They are unprocurable. I’ve telephoned all over the country to famous herds, and scoured every village and farm in Sussex. Mr. Owen, who sold me the two old goats years ago from Rose Green, has two milky animals and I go daily and practise my hand at milking and ‘stripping’ the udders. I can do it quite well now, but I feel I’ll never get goats.

  There was quite a struggle to get the laying pullets, but by dint of walking into every farm between here and Chichester, I bought six from a very eccentric farmer. He always complained of being half asleep and he wouldn’t give me any guarantee that they’d lay eggs. I liked his lack of salesmanship and preferred it to the kind of man that tells you how lucky you are to have come to him, so the next day I went to collect. He complained again of my having woken him and we popped the panic-stricken six into my shut car. They were fluttering all round me as I drove home, clucking and making messes and obstructing the view of the road, but an egg was laid in the car and three more appeared in the egg nests before night, so Wadey and I were thrilled.

  I collect pails of disgusting scraps from neighbouring houses, boil them and then with my hands break the pulp up small and mix it with rationed meal. They fall on the muck and it’s a great pleasure as we had only three old foreign eggs the first week. Now I hope to have fifty a week when Conrad brings me another six hens, and we shall sell them easily. The pigs are being bought before I write again. The bombs fall pretty fast and the planes are incessantly over very low day and night. We had a stick of them in Bognor the other night all around the station. They didn’t do a great deal of harm and only killed one person, but it’s a different kind of blitz to get used to. Always in London and other parts I have been, balloons or barrage have kept them in the upper sky. Here at night with our paper, leaking roof I feel there is nothing to divide the enemy from me.

  Papa commutes. He likes it very much and he catches the 7.45 train in the morning and gets back at 8 or 9 p.m. according to how busy he is. We have dinner like we did last year over the drawing room fire, cooked by a daily ‘general’ who looks like an elderly Marie Antoinette, but I can boss her and the food is delicious. I like being in the country a hundred times better than London but I miss you, my darling. On Sundays we go over to Bosham and have lunch at the Ship Inn Club. It’s most charming. The water laps the houses at high tide and there’s a little bar after your own heart. I can’t remember if we ever went there together. When I was younger than you the theory was that the best sunbonnets were made at Bosham, also that King Canute’s daughter was buried in the church. Off Selsey there is a cathedral under the sea. It once stood on dry land but the sea claimed it. They say on rough nights you can hear the bells pealing.

  A happy Easter, dear egg.

  April 18th, 1941

  I’m still delighting in the novelty of farming. The goats are still eluding me. They appear to be unobtainable, so I have settled to buy a cow. Then I spent a happy afternoon with Conrad, fertilising the field with ammonia phosphate so that it should grow richer and greener for my milk to be more plentiful for my cheeses. The whey will then fatten my four little pigs well. They are to be crammed into the goat house and have a little pen round them and never be allowed to take an unnecessary step for fear of losing an ounce of weight. Yesterday I went to Bosham for my bees, to be told by the beeman that they were almost unprocurable. Everyone is going in for bees and goats and I had been thinking how clever I was to cultivate stock that no one else would be likely to want. Then six mo
re laying pullets arrived at the station in a crate, and I went to pick them and Papa up at 8 p.m. I packed them into the dickey and Papa into the seat and, looking at my gauge, was horrified to learn that the petrol tank was almost dry. I knew the only petrol station was shut and so we had to risk it, Papa in an agony of fret and fuss. Of course it gave out a little further away than Craigweil entrance from our house,4 and I had to break it to Papa that it meant carrying a crate of pullets as well as walking home. He took it with a pretty good grace, and off we staggered; the crate was intolerably heavy and covered with sticking-out nails.

  An army lorry came blustering towards us so I hailed it, which made Papa scream with shame and put the hens down, so I told him to leave it to me and to walk on which he was not at all loath to do. I asked the young soldiers to give me a drop of petrol to get me and my birds home. They said they were sorry they couldn’t. I said I’d give them a coupon. They said no, it was strictly against the law. I said they couldn’t leave a lady in distress and that I’d have to leave the car in the road with its lights on all night, and blocking the way if there was an invasion. They said they agreed, and that they’d break the law if I gave them a tin and had I got a rubber tube? I gave them the tin and told them I didn’t happen to have a rubber tube on me. They backed their tank on to a side lane and fiddled for a few minutes and started to come back by the ditch like people ambushing. At that moment an officer passed leisurely on a push-bike. On seeing him they both lay flat on their stomachs, concealing the guilty red tin. He looked round but thank God did not stop, and they hurled the tin into my window and tore back to the lorry and were off in a flash. Still I was saved, and after putting the juice in and struggling to get the crate in, I arrived triumphant with car and fowls, so now we’ve got twelve birds laying eight or nine eggs a day and I sell them to the people who give me their scraps, which encourages them.

  We had a pretty nasty raid here the night after the dreadful London one. I was all alone, Papa having stayed up that night. Conrad was in the house but not of course with me, and the house was shaking and the noise of planes and distant guns and occasional thumps was kept up all evening from nine onwards. At ten I went and looked out of the best bedroom window towards Portsmouth. It was light as day. What are called ‘chandeliers’ – clusters of bright incandescent lights that the Germans drop to light up the ground, and a steady light of a white-green colour that came from I couldn’t make out where. I hated looking, but Wadey can’t keep away from windows. We went down again and about an hour later there was a new succession of noises which we thought were incendiaries in the garden. We put the lights out and went out to see. As I opened the window-door an appalling crash, which was a land mine at Aldwick, tore the shutter out of my hands. The lights then were as violent at Bognor as they had been at Portsmouth. I couldn’t manage to shut the shutter properly, and the blackout being then incomplete we had to sit on the hearthrug and go on with the Times crossword by the light of the fire and one candle. I did not fancy going to bed. There seemed at 12.30 to be a bit of a lull so up I went, and actually to sleep, only to wake again at 2.30 to a series of appalling crashes. That pretty well finished it and after a bit I got to sleep again.

  The noise we took to be incendiaries turned out to be our soldiers firing at and bringing down a parachute flare. Hutchie is here, fat and greedy, and Hilary came for a night. He is frightfully decrepit, moves as slowly as a tortoise and is covered with gravy and ash and candle-grease and droppings from his drinks. His son has just died but it hasn’t affected his spirits. He can’t move or get up without some support and so always carries a very frayed umbrella about with him. It looks so strange indoors. Noël Coward too came down, fresh from America and lecturing for the Red Cross in Australia. He brought us some lovely nylon stockings from Kaetchen, but not a line from him. Last letter received five months ago. He knows how avid I am for news of you and him. What does he think it’s like living here that he denies me any pleasure that he can give? I’ve cabled Bill to ask if the Cat has lost his powers or his reason or his life.

  May 4th, 1941

  I’m too busy to write. I’ve taken on more than I can manage and worse is to come. Yesterday I bought a seven-year-old cow for £27 and she is called the Princess. She is ugly and tame and heavily laden with milk. I was out collecting my swill when she arrived, but I met the men coming back who told me she would be sad and dejected for a day or two. Indeed she looked it, but I stroked her and gave her some dairy cubes, and was happy to find she didn’t mind my handling her as I had imagined insuperable difficulties when I came to milk her. I put a big nail into the tree trunk near the little gate that leads into the field opposite the dining room and also a large hook at the height of my knee with a little pail hung on it full of meal. Then, armed with a halter to drag her by, and a sponge to mop her udder with, and my fine new pail that can’t be knocked over because it weighs a ton and into which a hoof can’t get because the opening is so peculiar, and my milking stool, I set off to milk. Nothing would move her from her disconsolate position by the fence near the lodge, so I gave in to her whim and milked her there with speed and success. She gave over a gallon and a half and it only took me twenty minutes. Hutchie watched and scoffed a bit, and Papa arrived and helped me feed the pigs, and we looked for eggs, and there were nine which is good (one day the birds laid twelve – a hundred per cent). Wadey is mad about them. All the farmer’s daughter has come out in her and she is most keen and helpful and works hard too.

  All that was yesterday. At night we put our clocks on so that today when we call it noon it’s really only 10 a.m. This suited me with the Princess because as she’s used to being milked at five, it became six and I gave her an extra hour till seven.5 It was the most radiant morning imaginable – stainless sky, larks exulting above, a warm sun well up already and white hoar frost underfoot. Pail and stool under arm I marched into the field – to find no sign of the Princess. She had vanished. All the gates were shut and barbed wire all around the field. Mrs Barham6 appeared and said she had seen her go out at 6.30 and Jones had gone to look for her. I did not fuss but fed my pigs and pottered around knowing Jones would bring her back in a minute. Cows can’t hide, poor things.

  Getting impatient, I got my car and whizzed off to the dairy where I found my old Princess knee-deep in cow feed, gorging herself to the horns and I’m sorry to say cow-patting into precious rationed meal. I’d cleverly brought a halter and a pail of her favourite dairy cubes. I flung the rope over her silly head and to my surprise and relief she was not too glutted to follow the pail and me along the road. Every little while I’d give her a nibble to encourage her, and she came along famously better than me who had huge rubber boots on, unsuitable for a long walk, and my nightcap so that I dreaded meeting anyone. The Princess had of course no boots or cap.

  When we got to the shops she saw through the pail hoax and stopped dead. Nothing, nothing would move her. I pulled from in front and kicked from behind and hullaballooed and shouted and threatened and cursed and even pretended to eat the meal myself to show how good it was, as one does to a fastidious child. No one was stirring. No sign of help. She was bursting with milk and I felt desperate, and after what seemed a year a Bay Estate7 denizen in a motor came by and was brought to a stop by Her Highness. He got out and helped push while I dragged. No good. Then thank God three soldiers appeared and the five of us practically carried her the rest of the way to the stable gate, and there I milked her. It took me an hour. I was utterly exhausted. There were three gallons to be milked out – twenty-four pints or forty-eight tumblers. Then I had to get the Joneses to help me carry her into the field, which looks most appetising now the fertiliser has done its work and made the grass much more luxuriant and green, but it didn’t tempt her and no sooner had I turned my back and gone to the dairy with Wade to measure the yield and take the cream off yesterday’s to make into butter, than she was out again. Mrs. Barham actually saw her get over the barbed wire, but unfortunately Mrs. B
arham from London thinks cows are dragons and won’t leave the house to raise the alarm till the idiot is out of sight and well away.

  This time though she didn’t get far. It’s pathetic because it’s due to loneliness and missing her old friends. I feel a brute. What shall I do when the goats arrive, which they will do this coming week? Mr. Simon Marks of Marks & Spencer found them for me at last – a pedigree one costing 25 guineas which he is giving me and a good one costing £6 which I am buying. I didn’t dare take a peep into the gift-goat’s mouth so didn’t dare ask whether they were horned or unhorned. Between cow and goats I shall supply us and Jones and evacuees with milk and add a little to our butter ration, make a cheese three times a week off two days’ milk and the seventh day use it for butter. All the whey and buttermilk go to the pigs, which have cost me £9.10.0 and which I shall sell again in three months for I hope about £40. The goats I shall keep and the Joneses can live on them during the winter, and the pedigree one can have a kid next spring. The cow will be keeping us in milk and butter and making sixty cheeses, for I hope about £20. The chickens will be eaten when they stop laying. It seems to me that if one doesn’t pay labour and doesn’t get swine fever or foot and mouth or white diarrhoea, one is bound to make.

  May 13th, 1941

  I write so seldom because my time is so filled. A goat arrived. Conrad and I went to the station to meet it. Emaciated and terrified it was, with a gnawed cord around its poor throat. We lifted it into the car. All our stock travel like the gentry in a limousine. When I got it out at the stables it gave a sudden spasmodic dash, backed by super-goatian strength, and freed itself from my nervous grasp. It ran like a satanic symbol across the garden, over the barricades and into the barbed wire.8 I with the menace of mines in my mind pursued it into the wire and rescued it whole, but with its udder lacerated and bleeding.