by Diana Cooper
I’ve just finished the culture physique and am off to pack parcels for French prisoners. It’s exceedingly tedious, putting chocolate, butter, sugar, tobacco, soap, coffee and biscuits into little wooden boxes. There is no order and no overseeing. A wild cram-in, like you or me packing in a hurry Monday morning, and I feel sure it will be a brutal German who will open and gobble up the good things and leave the dehydrated carrots for the hungry Frogs.
The other day I took a car to the top of an Atlas mountain and walked and mule-back-rode for about twenty-six miles. I nearly died afterwards, but at the time it was wonderful and precipitous – a tiny mule path. One of our party, a sailor, had vertigo and didn’t enjoy it so much. I adored it. We paused halfway in a strange oasis village by a gushing waterfall, ate our lunch, drank some wine from the Hoggar and composed ourselves to sleep, boots off and feet left in the stream to shrink and cool. Captain Wharton21 (aged 65) dropped off with childish haste and snored shamelessly. Next came me who thought I hadn’t slept at all till Vertigo Miller R.N. said ‘Why do you sleep with one eye open?’ so I suppose I did get forty winks. Next Minou de Montgomery, the other lady of the party and a Frog, tied a bandana over her face and slept like a baby, or rather like a nice dog with occasional whelps and whines, purporting to come out of dashing dreams. I’m not sure it wasn’t all pretence.
Write what you have to learn in poetry, what your place is – the river – new boys – what you read in school and out and that you love me dearly. But for being deprived of you I’m really very happy and thrilled by the Resistance movement inside France, members of which we see a lot of – people who parachute in and out and people who travel always with their death dose. When danger is great they carry this dose in a minute box in their mouth as there would be no time to fumble in their pockets. It is swallowed when they fall into German hands for it is certain almost that under torture and an injection of that drug that deadens your resistance, they will betray their comrades. A man here the other day resorted to it.
June 2nd, 1944
It is our Silver Wedding day – June 2 1944. If you had not come to me so late in time you might be twenty-three years old and fighting outside Rome. Thank you for being late. I wonder if you had any choice – if you chose us and the year – it’s possible. I feel sadly happy – twenty-five years gone is the sad part. I’m crying a bit as I write, but they’ve been lovely years with no storms for Papa and me – not one – and I love him as much as ever I did. Some strange almost unknown Frog has sent me a silver necklace – very massive and chased with demon motifs. It’s round my neck as I sit up in bed. Nightcap and common pink silk nightgown don’t marry very well with its barbarity. You may see Papa before you see this. I hope you do, but I’ll be miserable here without him. Encourage him to return soon, or he’ll have less cause to return end of July and we do all want to be together. I’ve told Virginia Cowles22 to go and see you. She is such fun. Ask her for Resistance stories. Tell her from me to take the most romantic of all the Pimpernels down to Eton – M. d’Astier.23
Algiers
June 1944
I am deeply worried about the situation of the de Gaulle Government being, or rather not being, recognised. Roosevelt is losing favour with me. Meanwhile we are losing it with the French daily. They will never forgive being kept entirely out of the liberation of their own country. They have united themselves under Wormwood. They have produced an army that fights to the death in Italy and would in France. They have organised a soul-stirring resistance inside their country. These advantages, hardly forged, are tempered and we use them, but when it comes to taking them into councils or taking their views on administration in their own land, or of letting them spill their own hot blood on their own earth – oh no, the President can’t agree. I would hardly dare look them in the face if it wasn’t that they all know Papa works all his flesh down to the bone (a long way) for them.
Algiers
July 28th, 1944
O I’m so hot. It’s 90 in the room now at 9.30 a.m. really 7.30.
The house is overloaded. The boiler burst. Randolph has arrived fresh from a bad plane crash in Yugoslavia. He looks like death – emaciated, bent, caverns of black with two dead eyes lurking in them, water and bandages on his knees, a jolted spine, but spirits as ebullient as ever. He lies in a cupboard upstairs and is carried down to the sitting room by four Wop gorillas. Eve Curie fills another room with her khaki and medals and dreams of échelons and mêlées and garde-à-vous. Victor has the best room and is too big for it. I have to go to the docks now and collect a bag of bombs with him. Bloggs will-o-the-wisps around.
They all bring their breakfast trays on to my bed and smoke on it and lie on it and abuse each other across me, and only wear towels or underpants so show everything, and I get no moment to myself to write or to read or to think – perhaps as well for if I do I think sadly of not being with you or you with me because I do love you so, and hate to miss any part of your growth and affection and fun.
August 1944
Beloved, I’m so sad about Rex.24 I hope you are. He was so fond of you and made fun for you. He was the soldier that I loved most in this vile war. He wasn’t the kind that soldiers are made from – too sensitive and weak in body – too imaginative and delicate in every way – yet he dealt with the necessity as a soldier born and put more vigour and determination into the tedious life and grim fight than many a bloodthirsty tough, I’m sure.
I’m very weary and discouraged, though the war news is wonderful and should make up for all. It’s too hot. I’m half glad you are not here. Everybody’s nerves and livers are all over the shop. I can’t keep my bedroom under 90 degrees. Appetites have gone and any zest for anything. One drips it away. Randolph doesn’t really help me either. He’s quite crippled and staggers into my bedroom at 9 a.m. followed by his breakfast. He is quite untrained and coughs and gurks like some dreadful dredger, bringing up repugnant things that have suffered a stomach-change, which he spews into his hand or into the vague. If I get up to turn on my bath he immediately takes my bed and puts his black dirt-encrusted feet on my sheets and sweats into them and covers them with ash and burns them with butts. He drinks all the gin and all the valuable fruit juice and is here, I think, for the duration as his legs don’t improve. He is madly bored and leaves his mouth wide open to save opening it for perpetual yawns. Withal he’s most affectionate and well meaning. Victor has gone home by ship. I had to motor his live bombs about the town and was thankful to get them on board the Orion. I’m dying to get a letter from you but quite understand trials25 and journeys and excitements and alarms and excursions will have left no time for correspondence.
August 17th, 1944
Lovely letter received from you. I’m glad you did well in trials but you don’t give me half enough detail. All my careful instructions seemed to have miscarried completely about your journeys etc. It looks really as though we’ll all spend Christmas in Paris. What fun it sounds now. I suppose if we do we shall shiver in an ice-cold unfireplaced and unheated Embassy with neither light, gas nor water and dear old Spam and tinned milk again, probably with flying bombs as an accompaniment. Even that sounds nice from this country where we are baked and glutted with food and strong wines. I couldn’t exist without the mountain chalet,26 where it’s cold and crystalline.
Last Monday I walked all the way down to the plain from the top, only about twelve kilometres, but every step of them jagged and perpendicular. I felt like a Mahometan Christian27 plodding my stony way accompanied by Faithful – he too was an Arab – the city always in our view and never getting any nearer. I wore shoes from Morocco, all I’ve got. The kind of nails blacksmiths use hold them together and keep coming through the soles and into the flesh of heel and ball of foot. The Faithful guide (by profession the man who calls for ordures) would knock them in with a stone or drag them out with his teeth. I stumbled a lot and towards the end when pretty tired I hadn’t the strength to save a stumble from a fall, and so went along
collecting blood and future scabs on knees and hands and chin. I enjoyed it immensely.
August 27th, 1944
I’ve been to Rome. I said I would. I took Bloggs who got a few days leave. We hopped a Dawson28 plane and arrived at 3 p.m. in Naples. The first thing I did was to go and see Tucker’s brother29 in hospital – quite a job, as there seem to be no sisters, nurses, orderlies or anything, so after reading and guessing and trying to deduce from signs and symbols what wing of this gigantic repair shop would be the thigh-mending department, I had to go round hundreds of beds looking for Timothy, like Edith Swan-Neck looking on the battlefield for the dead Harold. I found him at last, but he was unrecognisably thin and I was looking rather un-Bognor, so it took him a spell to recognise me. Squalor surrounded him – few pillowcases and lots of oldish stains, and six other suspended thighs all sweating and smelling, but he seemed very happy and uncomplaining and is due to return for convalescence.
I stayed a night with the Macmillans30 – only Dorothy there – and was sharp enough to borrow a good car from a sailor I had got something on. Off we went next morning, a six-hour drive up all the battle route. Cassino is like some dreadful disease – unrecognisable as a town, more like suppurating leprous stalagmites. I went to the Grand Hotel in Rome. Randolph had got me a room. It’s an old-fashioned sort of Ritz, translated for the nonce into a sort of Kremlin – men with tommy-guns at every door, because all the bigwigs with the exception of Duckling were staying there. Like the Kremlin too there seemed to be no charge for anything – rooms free, and if I signed bills for breakfast or Randolph or Mr. Wu’s drinks – nothing more was heard of the item.
I had a banquet at the British Embassy for Duckling. I sat next to him, but every time he looks at me he remembers Wormwood and has apoplexy. I’ve written to him and said it must stop or he’d best not see me. I saw the Pope carried shoulder-high through two throngs of Allied soldiers, blackamoors and Poles and ordinaries, and he touched one per thousand of the rosaries held up to him. I didn’t enjoy any part of the lark. Now I’m back and am glad I did it. Back in a horrible U.S. Navy plane with no window. We stopped at Ajaccio but saw only the dust of the airfield.
So much has happened – Paris free and being bombed – we off any day.
August 28th – Freddie Fane and two Embassy people off today by ship. I’ll do all I can to get a final week with you at Bognor or some place, failing that I’ll be over to see you before the next holidays – anyway Christmas in Paris.
Too hot and too irritated with stickiness and flies.
* * *
1 The Allies had landed in Normandy on 6 June.
2 Eton patois for the house matron.
3 It was in this capacity that he became involved with the planting of faked documents on a corpse, the hugely successful Operation Mincemeat which gave rise to his only novel, Operation Heartbreak, as well as to the book and film The Man Who Never Was. Ben Macintyre has recently retold the story, with a wealth of new material, in Operation Mincemeat.
4 It is one of the advantages of Eton that from the start every boy has his own room, even though for the younger ones it may be little bigger than the average sleeping-car.
5 Winston Churchill was recovering from a small stroke in his favourite hotel, the Mamounia in Marrakesh.
6 Another alias for the Prime Minister.
7 Members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.
8 Churchill’s personal physician.
9 The famous one-piece ‘siren suit’ of his own design. buttoning up the front, in which the Prime Minister dressed informally throughout the war. He had it made in various colours and materials, including velvet. On 21 September 1940 his Private Secretary Jock Colville described him in his diary as ‘clad in his air-force blue, zip-fastened cloth overall which he straps tightly round his stomach and in which he looks like an Eskimo’.
10 Lord Beaverbrook.
11 By now the party had been joined by General de Gaulle.
12 Pasta of Marrakesh.
13 Nickname for de Gaulle (‘wormwood and gall’, Lamentations, iii, 19).
14 Detectives.
15 The wife of the Soviet Ambassador.
16 She had been in England for my Easter holidays and had now returned.
17 Air Vice Marshal.
18 She apologised again on landing, expecting perhaps a word of apology or sympathy for the shock she had suffered. Instead, the AVM simply grinned and said, ‘Oh don’t worry, we can get that mended in no time.’ Two years later, when he came to lunch at the Paris Embassy, my mother told the story to the assembled company. Still no sympathy: ‘I promise you, Lady Diana, it was fixed in a couple of hours.’
19 The Comptroller.
20 My father’s batman.
21 Captain Eric Wharton, the Naval Attaché.
22 A dashing young American journalist, author of Looking for Trouble. She later married Aidan Crawley MP.
23 Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, one of the leaders of the Resistance.
24 The painter Rex Whistler had been killed in action on 18 July.
25 Eton exams.
26 Which she had scrounged.
27 The hero of The Pilgrim’s Progress.
28 Air Vice Marshal Dawson was, as I remember, head of RAF Transport Command.
29 Timothy Jones had trodden on a bomb at Anzio and had had his leg amputated.
30 Harold Macmillan was at that time British Government Representative to the Allied Forces in the Mediterranean. Lady Dorothy Macmillan was his wife.
7
‘The giraffe shall lie down with the duck’
THE PARIS EMBASSY, SEPTEMBER 1944–APRIL 1947
27 Rue Herder, Strasbourg
January 10th, 1947
My darling Mummy and Papa,
The Schmidt family have a very comfortable three-storey house in the residential quarter. Monsieur was out when I arrived, but I was greeted by Madame. I should put her age at about thirty. Unmade-up, but quite pretty, neat and tidy. She’s charming and gives one the feeling that nothing is too much trouble. There are two children, boys. The younger one, Jean-Bernard, only two or three, and I have seen him but once. The other is four, with great charm and a faultless knowledge of French, German and Alsatian. He adores me, presumably because he made me read Babar while I was waiting for tea. It has now become rather a bore, though, because I can’t ever shake him off.
The only other inhabitant of the house is a large Airedale, by far the most ferocious dog I have ever seen in my life, compared with which Cerberus would resemble a somewhat sickly pekinese. I live in perpetual danger of my life, because every time it sees me it makes a rush and has to be held back by Madame, snarling. My fear is extremely embarrassing, and is augmented by the fact that instead of saying ‘It’s all right; he won’t hurt you’ Madame looks rather worried, and says, ‘I should keep away until he knows you better.’ Hardly encouraging.
All my love,
John Julius
PARIS HAD BEEN liberated by the Allies on 26 August. My parents flew back from Algiers to London at the end of the month and left again for Paris a couple of weeks later. In mid-September I saw them off from (I think) Northolt, with an escort of forty-five Spitfires – the war was still very much in progress.
My father was of course thrilled. After a fairly unfortunate war – he had hated the Ministry of Information, while his Far Eastern mission, through no fault of his own, had been a failure, overtaken by events – here was the best job he could ever have asked for. He loved France, spoke beautiful French and could discuss its history and literature for hours; moreover he would be moving into one of the most magnificent houses in all Paris, bought by the Duke of Wellington from Napoleon’s sister Pauline.
My mother was a good deal less keen. She was of course happy for my father, knowing as she did how much it meant to him; but the prospect of being British Ambassadress in Paris was daunting indeed. She had never enjoyed grandeur for its own sake; left to herself, she would inf
initely have preferred to return to Bognor and her little farm. But she had no intention of letting my father down, and once installed in the Embassy she certainly made the best of it. At the end of the superb enfilade of drawing rooms on the first floor was Pauline’s bedroom, with hangings of crimson silk and her retour d’Egypte1 bed, with ancient Egyptian figures and sphinxes carved at the corners. It was perhaps a little short and narrow by modern standards, but my mother wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity like that; she and my father were to sleep happily in it for the next three years.
There was only one feature missing in this glorious house: it had no library – ‘indeed,’ my father wrote, ‘hardly a bookshelf worthy of the name’. He therefore wrote to the Ministry of Works, proposing that if they would convert a suitable room into a library worthy of the building, he would fill it with books, nearly all leather-bound, on English and French history and literature. The Ministry replied, predictably, that the time was not ripe; he asked them how soon they were expecting the arrival of another ambassador who would be willing to present a thousand or more books. In the end the authorities caved in, and the result was the really lovely room, designed by three of Paris’s top decorators, that we see today.
My own memories, from when I joined my parents there for my Christmas holidays, were first of the perishing cold. This was the most savage winter that Paris had experienced for fifty years, and the British Embassy was one of the few buildings to have any heating. We were also among the still fewer that could provide limitless gin and whisky, obtained at tax-free NAAFI prices – around sixpence a bottle. From the start, my mother established free-for-all drinks parties at six o’clock every night in the salon vert, open to all friends, French and English alike, who cared to drop in. For the French in particular, who had seen little enough of either drink for the past four years of occupation, these evenings were a godsend, attracting all the intellectual and literary elite of Paris – writers like Jean Cocteau, designers like Christian Bérard,2 actors like Louis Jouvet. I would call them by their first names and mix them dry martinis and whisky-and-sodas; but alas, although my French was fluent enough, neither my conversational powers nor my understanding were up to the challenge. The fact was that I was just a bit too young: an awkward adolescent, superficially sophisticated perhaps for my age, but at bottom a rather slow developer without any real appreciation or understanding of what was going on around me. Had I been three or four years older, I should have got a thousand times more out of it all and, I like to think, acquitted myself rather better.
