by Diana Cooper
Last night Conrad and I stayed in the fields until 11.30, and in the almost dark tried to get the six pigs from the pen to the sty. Three we styed, three we let evade us. Once out these fat little white congested indolences became an energetic young wild boar and O the hunting and the stalking, the struggling and the sweating. It ended just before I passed out by grabbing them one by one by the back legs (the most difficult performance after getting them once more into the pen) and wheelbarrowing them into the sty, to the accompaniment of such blood-curdling yells and shrieks that I felt all Sussex must wake to the din and brand me as an animal torturer. The Princess has paid a visit to the bull and we shall hope for a calf next March. Meanwhile if I am transported to another continent who will tend my Princess? Where are my Moths and Mustardseeds and Cobwebs and fairy Monsieurs all? Who will stroke her ears and burnish her silken flanks and talk to her in her own voice (moovoice) as I do? The ducks are not laying so well, so I picked on one who looked as I thought uneggy and put her into a cramped coop and fed her on curds and whey. I told her that if she could eject an egg she would be reprieved, and this morning after the most determined straining and sitting and squawking Donaldwise, she produced a fine white egg, so her life is prolonged and I’m glad of it and in goes another poor tryer.
Spirits soar lately – the Russian fight – the waning of German confidence – the respite of bolts from our blue – the vigour of our bolts from their day and night blue. These things have buoyed us considerably but the longest day is past and the dread of winter is on your poor mother for one. Still who knows it may not be spent here, and who knows that I may not see my dearest dearest child if only en passant.
* * *
1 Fara Bartlett, young and attractive, had accompanied Milo Cripps to Canada as guardian-governess and had taken a flat in Toronto.
2 The local butcher.
3 My parents’ pre-war butler.
4 About a quarter of a mile.
5 During the war clocks were not put back an hour for the winter, but went forward an extra hour in summer.
6 Most families from the London slums had long since found the country uninhabitable (‘all those trees!’) and returned to their homes; but we still had one family, the Barhams, living in the tiny lodge by the drive gates.
7 The Aldwick Bay Housing Estate was immediately opposite our front gate.
8 Part of the coastal defences.
9 It was – my ninth – and I wasn’t.
10 A neighbour.
11 Her son, still a friend.
12 From her time as acting the nun in The Miracle.
13 An old sailor who sold lobsters and prawns on Bognor beach.
14 Their full name was Khaki Campbells.
15 Struggle, as in Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
16 Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June.
17 The second wasn’t. Brendan Bracken did indeed succeed my father at the Ministry of Information.
5
‘Papa is a wreck’
SINGAPORE AND THE FAR EAST, AUGUST 1941–MAY 1942
Kiluna Farm
13th July, 1941
My darling Mummy and Papa,
Thank you so much for your last letter enclosing all the snaps. Princess looks beautiful. I am also enclosing photos this time. I am keeping an album of all the photographs taken worth having. So far there are about sixty snaps in it. The one of your milking the goat was awfully good, and I love the one of you and Papa in the drawing room, whereas one of the pigs is priceless! I have shown them to Dorothy, and she thought them all very good indeed.
We have been having boiling hot weather lately, one day about a week ago it was (this will make your blood run cold!) 120 degrees!!! Because of this, the swimming pool is a great attraction, and we stay in about an hour every day. I can now float and swim under water, and the swimming instructor is teaching me to dive. I don’t think I’m really terrible at it, although I always face the problem of keeping my head down and my legs together.
I suppose you can’t swim at Bognor.
Lots and lots of love,
John Julius
IN THE SUMMER of 1941 the situation in the Far East was giving increasing cause for alarm. War with Japan now seemed virtually inevitable; meanwhile the Prime Minister was receiving disturbing reports of the lamentable state of British defences, principally in the colony of Singapore itself but also in Malaya, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Time was almost certainly too short to allow for very much to be done; but my father was nevertheless despatched to Singapore with ministerial status. His orders were to travel as widely as possible through the whole area and to submit a report on the likelihood and probable consequences of a Japanese invasion.
It would never have occurred to my mother not to accompany him. Whatever dangers lay before him her place, she steadfastly believed, was always at his side. It need hardly be said that this view was not shared by the civil service or the military. Not only, it was pointed out, would the administrative and transport problems be greatly increased by her presence; there would also be bitter feelings of resentment on the part of many senior officers who had been obliged to leave their wives at home. My father, however, made no attempt to dissuade her. He knew, first of all, that it would be a waste of time; he was also aware that she would be considerably less trouble than the authorities feared; that she would always look after herself and expect – indeed, accept – no special treatment of any kind.
They flew off on the Yankee Clipper flying boat via Lisbon – where they were delayed for three days – the Azores and Bermuda, and arrived in New York a week or so later.1 They spent a fortnight in America – my father mostly in Washington, my mother all the time with me. She and I enjoyed ourselves enormously, flying one day to Washington (my first flight) and touring the FBI, just as she had done in 1939. All too soon, however, they left on the next stage of their journey.
Their four-month stay in the Far East was not a happy one. My father had looked forward to it, but he had cordially disliked Hawaii (‘Give me Bognor any day’) and from the day of his arrival in Singapore he felt his position to be impossible. The Governor Sir Shenton Thomas and the Commander-in-Chief Sir Robert Brooke-Popham considered him an ignorant mischief-maker; he believed them to be almost criminally negligent. His powers were enough to cause them suspicion and even alarm, but not such as to enable him to dismiss them as he longed to do. He knew, too, that all his labours would be in vain: his report and recommendations would reach London far too late to be acted upon.
For those of us who are nowadays accustomed to flying everywhere in the world at the drop of a hat, this chapter may come as a salutary reminder of just what wartime air travel could be. For my mother – who never overcame her fear of flying – every moment was an agony; but at least she was with my father. She could never have left him.
August 29th, 1941, Hawaii
My birthday2 – and who remembered it? No one but you and Nanny. What a lovely belt! I love and need. I always said you were a darling boy whatever other people thought. The flight went well. We had to fly due south to Los Angeles which added four hours (we need never have gone to San Francisco). The air was calm. I read and tried to forget and then came dinner and gin rummy for Papa and Tony Keswick and patience for me with Dorothy’s cards and then to bed put back 2½ hours. I woke in the small hours with my ears up to the explosion tricks, and the plane bumping a bit. Of course I thought it was a forced landing on to those bitter waves but nothing happened – it was just a change of level – so I went to sleep again to wake to a wonderful dawn glow at five and a steward’s voice saying we should land in an hour. We did and there were all the expected colours and costumes, honey-coloured girls in dewy grass skirts and hair pinned with blossoms, handing us garlands for our necks and tumblers of pineapple juice. The heat is great but we pretend we don’t feel it, knowing what is to come at Singapore.
The huge hotel of Waikiki Beach in which we live is all you imagine of palms and ex
otic flowers and minor-birds [sic] and surf bathing. We heard almost at once that instead of leaving 29th we should not be off till 31st, since then it has been postponed again till September 2nd and I expect more delays. Flying is certainly not a very express way of travelling, safe and slow perhaps instead of, as I thought, dangerous and fast.
Yesterday I went to a rich eccentric gentleman’s house the other side of the Island. It was so beautiful – like The Tempest – magic, full of sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. The house was mountain built, lost in exotic ginger flowers and unknown waxen ones, and low sweeping trees made of ivory or rubber or something and imagine the surprise when under these freakish equatorial trees calmly chewing their Hawaiian cud I saw lovely Guernsey cows. My dear Princess came mooing into my heart. It’s all very beautiful, but we are bored and want to get on. We left our great England to see a little scrubby boy, and to build up God knows what in Singapore, and not to ride with beach-boys on surf-boards or to watch a hula-hula girl start a heat wave by making her seat wave. The beauties of the Island will soon be swallowed up in defence developments, guns and airfields and training grounds and wireless depots and oil tanks. All the hideosities are ousting the umbrella trees and the butterflies and buds and ginger. It’s a tremendously important U.S. base and will soon be armed cap-à-pie.
I think of you in a world of changing seasons, now plunging into a cool pool, soon seeing the trees turn into their gold and scarlet, then tumbling in snow and roasting chestnuts. With us it will be always the same – wet, hot and greenish.
Government House, Singapore
September 10th, 1941
The long flight is over. We arrived here at 4 p.m. yesterday after our only really horrible day in the Clipper. It was boiling hot, squally and leaden-skied, and we flew, not at 10,000 feet which keeps you cucumber cool and clean and kind, but at 100 feet. This means there is no air at all – windows don’t open – and the whole beastly crowd of us were like live sardines in a tin on a stove, gasping, lying with no dignity and less shame in monstrous positions, smelling, speechless, loathsome to each other and to ourselves. The trip instead of taking ten hours from Manila took twelve but once we got near and the planes (now U.S. Buffalos) came out to escort us in, and Sing Sing at our feet looking full of character and charm, I felt better. There was the C.-in-C. Brooke-Popham to meet us on the dock, and impressive Government House motors, each with two Indians in gorgeous red and scarlet and white liveries, with queer scarlet hats (retained indoors). We are living in the gigantic Government House (I feel like a Lilliputian on a visit to Gulliver) until we find a house of our own – said to be an impossibility as nearly every general and almost all admirals from every quarter of our Far-Flung has turned up here and wants a house – but trust your brazen mother, we’ll get one.
I wish I had you by the hand – we’d enjoy it so much together. I can’t really get Papa to enthuse, he never looks round. They are all there, the hats like plates the Britishers won’t wear,3 the Malay peoples in skirts, so that until you meet them face to face it’s hard to guess their sex. The living dolls with slit eye and yellow head protruding out of a sling on their mother’s back, the smart boys who have gone into dress European clothes but still sit, so dressed, on their honkers, or straight on the roadway picking God knows what out of their toes. The streets plastered with advertisements, saying I suppose ‘Buy Camels’ or ‘My goodness my Guinness’ but being in Chinese characters looking ever so glamorous; it’s all here.
Government House is as cool as a fishnet and although it is the size of Welbeck4 we can all see and hear each other, which comes of having no doors or windows. My bed stands, mosquito-curtained, in the middle of a room thirty by thirty. For all that, I was woken in the night by a downpour of rain on the face, driven in from the Western Approaches, delicious and cooling.
September 23rd, 1941
Pencils don’t show in this climate, it’s too damp, so I’ll try a pen and get spotted with ink like a Dalmatian dog. I’m still loving Singapore. The house is a dream – slightly Hollywood. I carry a jade-green parakeet, tame but ill-tempered, on my wrist or shoulder. Its name is Dickie Burong and it has vermilion cheek and nose. The Chinese cook is first class, but I have to look like a trussed chicken or pretend to be red mullet before he understands what we want for dinner.
Papa and I and Tony Keswick flew in a bomber to Batavia. I had a long struggle to get on the bomber – ‘Women can’t’ – and a lot of bother but I won at midnight and we took off at 7 a.m. next morning. It was a two-engined Hudson and they’d screwed a wicker chair fast to the centre of the fuselage, but I couldn’t see out of the window from it, so preferred to crouch on a wooden ledge. We were all trussed up in parachute harness, which robbed me of all feminine dignity. Nothing looks so shameful as straps between the legs in a skirt.
The flight took three and a half hours. We flew slap over Java, renowned for its jungles, swamps, crocodiles, cobras, rhinos, horrors of all kinds. I could hardly bear to look down and speculate on what would happen if we were forced to come down. No hope anywhere I felt – no space for landing. If by some miracle we all came down in our parachutes and stuck on the trees, and climbed down the cables through the monkeys and macaws to the surface of writhing snakes and bloodsuckers, what next? We light a fire maybe – a saviour in a search plane sees our column of smoke, and drops us a message of hope – then what, how could we be got at – no roads, no axes. It did not bear thinking of, so I looked away and read the life of the old Empress of China.
Batavia (capital of the Dutch East Indies and in Java) was never on our nursery list of capitals.5 It was very ordinary compared with Singapore – modern town, spacious and sensible with wide streets and trams and no Chinese and many more white people. We drove for two hours upwards to see the Governor of the N.E.I. (Netherlands East Indies) and to spend a night with blankets over us. He is a great swell, corresponding to our Viceroy of India. Now of course, with Holland occupied by Huns and a homeless Dutch Government, he becomes the big noise with the eighty million inhabitants of what the Dutch call India (they call our India British India). A little Javanese, squat with big wooden face, stood behind each chair at dinner, attired handsomely in strange native liveries. They drop on their haunches when giving you anything on a salver, and if you give them an order, they clutch their private parts with both hands and bow from the waist.
The Governor was a true and good man without a ray of humour, but the country hates the Germans as much as we do, and will fight to the death if attacked by Japanese or anyone else. The destruction of Rotterdam after the collapse of Holland will keep their swords sharp for a long while.
October 3rd
In Rangoon there is a very famous temple-pagoda called the Shwe Dagon. It rises gold to the sky. Luncheon conversation was about it. To my surprise no one had ever been inside it. ‘Footwear’ was the explanation. ‘You have to enter barefoot. An Englishman can’t do that. People do everything there.’ ‘Full of lepers’, ‘the stink of the place’ – out rolled the excuses. I said one’s feet were washable, one did much worse with one’s hands, leprosy wasn’t thus caught, a temple vaut bien a whiff. They looked exaggeratedly shocked. I’ve got mixed. It was tea of course when this conversation took place, and when it was over we drove in closed cars to have a look round. When we came to the temple door I said ‘I’m going in.’ There was a bit of a scene. Captain Richmond looked revolted and Pilate-ish. Duff shook his cheeks at me, but I am blind and deaf when I list and in a flash I had my shoes and stockings off and was following the votaries into the great dark doorway.
It was one of the most repaying sights I have ever seen. I was quite breathless with excitement. In this high dark corridor that is always ascending are congregated sleepers, vendors, priests, water-carriers, every caste, every age, every race. Everything sold is beautiful – fantastically made miniature white pagoda-umbrellas to offer to Buddha, bunches of ginger-flowers, lotus and jasmine, cocks and hens like C
hinese ornaments, shining gold Buddhas inset with jewels. On and on you mount, the stairs are very steep, faint with the smell of exotic flowers. Burma girls smoking always their ‘whacking white cheroot and (actually) wasting Christian kisses on an ’eathen idol’s foot’,6 their hair agate-smooth, though like the White Queen they carry a comb in it (so handy). They wear a flower in it too, and a clean muslin shirt (always clean) above their bright, tight sarong. At last you come out on to an open, circular court, in the centre of which rises the cloud-high gold-leaf pagoda, surrounded by hundreds of Buddha shrines.
The devotees vary from nakedish men who walk round and round, falling whistling-bomb flat between every two steps (progress is slow) and the pretty little maidens, smoking and playing with their babies under Buddha’s nose. Orange and saffron priests lounge around, and little oil-saucers with floating wicks were everywhere being lit. I wished I could have stayed until dark to see the flickering, but Duff and Captain Richmond were weighing a ton on my conscience, so I hurried round. Even without pausing it took me over an hour. When I came out the atmosphere had improved a bit. My excited, radiant expression I think subdued Duff’s irritation, but the Captain still looked nauseated and sulked.
Singapore
October 31st, 1941
Papa’s Number 2, Tony Keswick, leaves us tomorrow by Clipper to England via Washington. He will bear this letter to you but you won’t see him, poor swatting scholar, though I hope Kaetchen will. He takes the Mission’s Report home to the War Cabinet and so part of our Far Eastern effort is over and finished. What next? The visit to Australia starting on November 3rd, a report on which follows the main report, which could not wait as events are so bellicose here. We shall be covering Australia and New Zealand for a month, then back to Singapore and an Economic Conference, whatever that is.
