Darling Monster

by Diana Cooper

  That was the note – American I think – always a novelty, never classical. Mangoes not grapes, absinthe not gin, presents in the oranges instead of pips. The very young friends back on leave were mad with joy to taste and savour so much, so much. The girls always very pretty, the party never more than fifty strong, a wonderful jazz band, changed halfway through an evening in favour of Hawaiians or whatever the latest craze happened to be. Gallons too much to drink. How I loathed those evenings. No one could ever be bothered with Moore, and he only wanted to dance with me. I had to sit next him at dinner, hear him murmur love or chich-chich-chich hotly in my ear as we shuffled and bunny-hugged around. I knew that as I left he dismissed the band – ‘the place becomes a morgue’ – so with my kind and benevolent heart I’d stay and stay till I dropped.

  Basil Hallam came into my life and therefore to these parties. He danced like a skater and with humour. After all, he was paid hundreds of pounds a week for letting people watch him, and I adored him. He used to drive me home at 4 or 5 a.m. and we’d spoon and be very serious and say we loved each other. I don’t think I ever said so really – the words always stuck in my throat till I was much older. But we’d drive round and round Regent’s Park in a taxi and hate to leave each other. The little room on wheels was a girl’s only setting to be alone with a dear one. He had very little conversation but acknowledged charm. Moore didn’t like him, as you can imagine. I called him (to Moore) my barley-sugar stick – note how disloyal. It sounds so trivial – it was rather.

  It all ended. French fell from high command. Moore left for America owing. Basil was not accepted for the Army because of veins. It seemed extraordinary that he should dance and be unable to march, but so it was. He could of course have sat in an office in a railway station, but I suppose they really wanted him to carry on at the Palace and delight the boys on leave. Public opinion got too critical. I got anonymous letters saying I was a traitor to my country in holding young men like him away from their patriotic duty. He went into the Balloon Corps – what corresponded in those days to Blimps, not for defence but for observation, captive of course. Poor Basil was sick all the time. Then the enemy shot his balloon, he jumped in his parachute and it ended, because it didn’t open.

  February 10th, 1948

  (1) Radio. I’m glad you’re so interested. My new one – Papa’s gift – is by my side. It’s an Ecko and plugs in which is what I didn’t want. Never tell Papa but I’m going to try and change it for that reason, except that in France and Chantilly and the Rue de Lille there is not likely to be the interference there is in a hospital with large electrical department. It gets the Third Programme but through a cackle of geese and burning timber, not quite good enough, though last night’s Electra (Gilbert Murray’s translation) could only be called top-hole. The Light Programme round the peak hours six to nine cannot be heard entirely free from a babel of distant tongues, like being in a closed room in the tower73 while the building was in progress. Another thing which apoplexies me with rage is the non-relation of published numbers – 342.1m. (877 kcs) – to anything written on any set I’ve seen. On mine is written Medium, Short I, Short II. These words are never mentioned in the Radio Times (my hour book), so all reception comes from trial and error.

  Dick Barton, Wu’s tyrant, I can’t get into – too much criss-cross of other programmes to fight. On the other hand I have listened once to Mrs Dale’s Diary and have had to change the hour of my diathermy so as not to miss the next instalment – no story, just horrors of daily life. Meistersinger is being overdone, so is Delius, and O the horrors! One the other night of the story of the seven or eight men who were in an open boat on the Atlantic after torpedoing for seventy-odd days – only two survived – and the ghastly gurglings and chopping off of gangrenous legs with axes and the gasps and shrieks of parched throats, and men going mad and stepping off to drown. I didn’t think it was fair on the people whose sons and lovers were actually the persons being depicted. I suppose they’ve only got to switch off before they hear their husband’s death rattle, but some ghastly fascination may hold them.

  (2) Knots. Bravo. Don’t forget them – glamorous for me as are white tropical suits.

  (3) I’m afraid I sent you a Balzac translation. I’ll send you the others in French, though the one I’m just going to finish you won’t care for as I did. I listened to Desmond [MacCarthy] on Arnold Bennett and Trollope – very good. Tonight I’ve got Elizabeth Bowen on Trollope to look forward to. For me he has enough humour, and a flavour as strong and delicate as fresh true bread. ‘Trust Trollope’, Max Beerbohm said.

  * * *

  1 No recollection.

  2 He had been knighted in the New Year Honours.

  3 Sir Oliver Harvey.

  4 For the fancy-dress Chelsea Arts Ball, then held annually at the Albert Hall.

  5 Literally a fine – here ‘to make amends’.

  6 London’s main theatrical costumier.

  7 Clothes were still rationed in 1947, and continued to be till 1949.

  8 Ann Rothermere’s sister, later Duchess of Marlborough.

  9 Koch de Gooreynd.

  10 Churchill, later to marry Anthony Eden.

  11 Fancy dress.

  12 Prof. Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, later to be unmasked as a Soviet spy.

  13 The Dudley Ward sisters, Penelope a film star, Angela married to Major-General Sir Robert Laycock.

  14 Their mother, Freda Casa Maury, formerly mistress of the Duke of Windsor.

  15 On foot. Liberty Boats were the small craft which ferried sailors on leave between ship and shore. Since Navy shore stations were treated in every respect like ships, parties of men walking into town were always so described.

  16 The Loved One.

  17 By Thomas à Kempis (d.1471).

  18 In fact, first cousin once removed. Stanley Baldwin’s and Kipling’s mothers were sisters.

  19 ‘Madame wears these shabby fox furs?’

  20 Pure silk.

  21 Rabbit farmer at pre-airport Gatwick.

  22 Gower Street. My parents bought No. 90 on their marriage, but were later able to add the first floors only of Nos. 92 and 94. By the time I knew it, the house therefore had a considerable piano nobile.

  23 The name originally given to a service dress cap in the First World War. The reference is to the Edwardian music-hall song ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’, re-popularised by Lonnie Donegan in the 1960s.

  24 Mrs Gilbert Russell, sister-in-law of Conrad.

  25 Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, tells a similar story. Ronnie Tree and his wife Nancy had divorced, and he had married Marietta Fitzgerald.

  26 Marietta.

  27 In their Sunday best.

  28 His handwriting was also illegible, so there was little communication.

  29 Extremely expensive Savile Row tailors.

  30 The cow, successor to the Princess.

  31 Miss Wade couldn’t manage Paris and was now living alone in the lodge at Bognor.

  32 This arrangement had been in force throughout the Embassy years.

  33 Companion of Honour, a distinction awarded personally by the monarch.

  34 American author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

  35 A new book of Louise’s.

  36 Nothing to worry about.

  37 Donald Mallett, with Eric Duncannon and Barley Alison a member of the Embassy staff.

  38 So as not to spend too much.

  39 Where my parents slept in her bed.

  40 He suffered from an unfortunate skin condition.

  41 ‘I feel a bit lost.’

  42 ‘It is with the compliments of Madame.’

  43 ‘Remember, they are herbivorous.’

  44 De Vilmorin, Louise’s brother.

  45 ‘She named the boy Ichabod, saying “The Glory has departed from Israel”.’ (1 Samuel 4:21.)

  46 The night ferry to England. The train went on to the boat.

  47 I remember the leg. It gave her a lot of pain
, but mended itself over time.

  48 Kieron Moore.

  49 Celebrated actress.

  50 Garrett and Joan (later Lord and Lady Drogheda).

  51 The actor, later Sir John Mills.

  52 The hokey-cokey.

  53 Sir Michael Duff was Juliet’s son.

  54 ‘Miss Betty’s’ – my kindergarten.

  55 Her son, Timothy Jones, married the sixteen-year-old Pandora Clifford (my future sister-in-law).

  56 Dominie, her youngest brother.

  57 Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, The New World.

  58 The host of BBC Children’s Hour.

  59 Gandhi had been assassinated on 30 January.

  60 Lord Mountbatten of Burma, actually Queen Victoria’s great-grandson.

  61 Katherine’s son, the Earl of Oxford and Asquith.

  62 The language of frogs.

  63 The village next to Haddon Hall, the second country house of the Rutlands, which dated back to the eleventh century. (It had last been added to in the sixteenth.) It had been virtually abandoned for some two hundred years until my mother’s brother John took it in hand and gave it as sensitive a restoration as any house has ever received.

  64 In our Sunday best.

  65 A light carriage.

  66 Feodor Chaliapin, famous Russian singer, in love with my mother.

  67 Guglielmo Marconi, radio pioneer.

  68 Novelist.

  69 Another ancient admirer of my mother.

  70 By becoming America’s leading isolationist.

  71 In later years she was always terrified of the air.

  72 The family house in Arlington Street had been converted into a hospital for the duration of the war.

  73 Of Babel.

  9

  ‘I must get up without coffee, that’s all’

  SETTLING IN, FEBRUARY–AUGUST 1948

  H.M.S. Ceres

  Wetherby Yorks

  Undated, March 1945

  It’s turned out nice again – the sun beats down from cloudless skies in its most determined record-breaking way, trees are in bud, and Yorkshire is anything but what I expected of it in mid-March. The hounds of spring have really got cracking, and the Navy rejoices. The news comes through that the fleet goes out in force at the beginning of September; several battleships, lots of cruisers and destroyers innumerable are off to the West Indies and British possessions, to show the flag and tell the sordid little Central American states that if they try any funny business they’ll be here today and Guatemala. The whole picnic represents about 230 writers like me. We have every hope, even, of going to South Africa on the way back. If, by some appalling oversight, I don’t make it, there’s always a hope for the Vanguard and the King and Queen, and Australia.1

  Lots of love,

  John Julius

  IT TAKES TIME to settle into a new house in a foreign country for the rest of your life. Both the Embassy and the Château de Saint-Firmin were furnished, but my parents still had many of their most loved possessions in store in London since the beginning of the war. They included my father’s vast collection of books, largely of history and literature, some two thousand of which he had given to the beautiful library which he had established in an almost bookless Embassy. The first half of 1948 was, inevitably, a restless time for both of them. One of its high spots must have been my father’s investiture as a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George2 and the lunch at Buckingham Palace that followed, memorably described in my mother’s letter.

  Quite apart from his decoration, my father was acquiring one or two new occupations in the hopes that they might improve his distinctly shaky finances. There was one mysterious one which he never properly understood and whose board meetings he almost invariably forgot; I cannot think it brought him in much. More important – and from his and my mother’s point of view a good deal more enjoyable – was his directorship of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. In the immediate post-war years air travel was nowhere near as universal as it is today; the flights were less frequent and a good deal longer, the delays often considerably greater. Many people preferred to travel by train, and the Wagons-Lits company ensured that they did so in maximum comfort. Once a year the directors, representing the principal countries of western Europe, would hold their meeting in a different capital – to which they would travel in their own private carriages, with bedrooms, drawing rooms and even bathrooms. I accompanied my parents once, to Madrid, but can remember virtually nothing about it.

  I, meanwhile, was undergoing my professional training as a writer at a camp in Wetherby in Yorkshire, and playing the piano in the ship’s dance band.

  69 Rue de Lille,

  February 22nd, 1948

  I write to you in spite of the fact that you might have left this universe for another one. I’m in bed in this rather sordid little two-room flat. It’s much colder than charity and I miss, I can’t tell you how much, my eagles and sphinxes and stars and my tent and my brass taps, and the general warmth and glow of returning to a house filled with welcoming servants. It’s too cold to get out of bed, so I have to get help or talk to Papa downstairs by ringing up Loel’s house opposite, but it rarely answers, so I’m cut off. I can’t see to dress or to paint out this hideous cyst beneath my eye (they swear it will ‘absorb’ itself, but after three weeks it’s not trying at all). So, by and large, I’m pretty miserable. Snow coming down in blankets today and I’d meant to drive to Chantilly where I hear the crocuses are up – the harvest of our sowing – but the weather is too inclement and Lapland-like. It will arrest the croci, I trust.

  Now, London recital. High spots were Tristan & Isolde sung by Flagstad. She sings with as little difficulty as we breathe, and her notes are of ‘red gauld’, but physically it’s a case of when’s the balloon going up? She is to sing The Walkyrie, and I should like to go with you. For pity’s sake tell me the hour when your leave begins and when it ends, and I will see if the opera is being given at one end or the other.

  The second highlight was lunch with the King following on Papa’s accolade. On arrival we were divorced by an R.A.F. equerry who shot Papa into the operational theatre and me into a waiting room where I was joined by Lady Spencer, a Queen’s woman. She said wasn’t it cold and I whined about sex segregation and my disappointment at not seeing the ceremony. It didn’t take five minutes before Papa was out again – blushing, honours thick upon him – when Lady Spencer disappeared like camphor and the R.A.F. boy shot us into the drawing room and also did the vanishing act. The luncheon party was six strong – K., Q., two princesses and us. The Queen, another balloon about to take off, covered in two-way stretch dove-grey with very padded-shouldered box jacket, Princess Elizabeth pale blue and same box jacket, Princess Margaret lemon and same jacket. The King a sailor.

  Conversation très agréable about the cold. The King’s approach is of the whining variety. ‘We can’t get enough to heat the place.’ ‘I can’t get them to cut the trees in the Mall – can’t even see Big Ben now.’ ‘I dunno what it is – if one gets hold of a good book someone always takes it before one has finished it’ – plaintive voice and suspicious rolled Rs. They don’t listen to him much; it’s her family and household. ‘All right, Daddy’, then a quick turn away and ‘What did you say, Mummy darling?’

  We moved into the dining room that gives out on to the hall – though it once gave out on to the gardens at Brighton, for it was lifted from the Pavilion and is remarkably eccentric in London – dragons and mandarins and palms and junks and phoenix. The pictures have been cleaned and glow with their pristine brightness, unlike those at Brighton which are mahogany-coloured from layers of discolouring varnish and smoke and breath.

  There were a lot of well-grown footmen, looking more like workhouse warders than flunkeys. I hope it’s only a hangover that causes them to be dressed in well-cut navy blue battledress tops, ordinary trousers and smart crowned G.R.s in scarlet on their hearts, but I fear they’ll never go back to their red
and gold. Kedgeree, with bigger and fresher salmon than we are used to, casserole of smaller and fatter chickens, sprouts and spuds and very common castle-moulded chocolate pudding, unbroached by me, selection of cheeses, sherry and moselle, and for Papa a slice of cold ham from the sideboard, he the only partaker. The conversation (when a word was to be placed through my particularly active barrage) of the most charming – gay, clever and amusing – criticisms of Murder in the Cathedral3 that they’d been to the day before, talk of Osbert and Rex. Papa at one moment asked me if he should go on with a piece, already embarked upon, about T. S. Eliot. He said he was apt to become a bore on the subject of Tom à Becket. At another moment I asked him if I could enlarge on Laura Corrigan’s4 wig. This mutual appeal tickled them a lot. Then there was gossip about Cecil and Chips and Paris, and the whole meal scintillated – if not with wit, with fun and good humour and interest.

  The Queen gets very pink in the face. They say she puts a lot back – port in lashings before lunch. Princess Margaret really the pin-up girl – petite, with faultless teeth disclosed by a radiant smile, wonderfully transparent skin tastefully made up, blue-green intriguing eyes, white arms and hands. P. Lillibet – they called her that – very pretty too and slim as a sapling if there only wasn’t so much Queen Mary promise. A lot of talk there was about Granny – how she can’t be kept out of theatres. She’s amused by the least convenable of the songs in Annie Get Your Gun, and when she asked Princess Elizabeth about it her answer was ‘Oh, Margaret sings it, Granny.’ ‘What a pity’ said the old girl, and later ‘that I didn’t hear her.’ Princess Margaret says she’s refrained, fearing to shock.

  Lunch over, we looked at pictures in the private rooms first, where are all the subjects I like best – Queen Victoria with a crinoline and lace bonnet nursing a baby against a background of blue sea and cactus – Nice, I thought, but it turned out to be Osborne, and Princess Alice ‘aged nine days’ painted from the foot of a lovely ormolu cradle by Landseer. Marriages and ceremonies of all kinds, the canvases massed with crowds, each individual a portrait by Tuxen, a Dane I think, of the 60s and 70s and 40s and 50s perhaps. Then into the big rooms and a squint at the Old Masters, less interesting and too cold. What I liked best of all was the Queen’s own sitting room – enormous blazing coal fire, seemingly a lot of blue satin lavishly draped, white fur rugs, choicest pictures, the cream of the Royal Collection, a vitrine of Chelsea plates – flowers, veg. and insects, collected during the war – exquisite taste, a huge ormolu writing table in the great bay window that gives on to the garden and more flowers than a prima donna, beautifully arranged – only orchids, large sprays by the dozens of cymbidiums and one vase the size of a bath of that indecent flower – the name always escapes me – pink and flat with a male organ erected in the middle – at least two hundred of them in various shades. So it all ended and we left delighted, thrilled, amused and loyal, sharing the view that they had a delightful life and needn’t have any more of the pity that I’ve lavished on them for years. I carried Papa’s decorations in two big cases away with me and later put them all on – long mayoral chain, two stars, ribbons galore, and I went on appointment to call on Victor. He wasn’t there, so the joke flopped.