by Diana Cooper
May 3rd. I’ve seen M. Borniche the painter, who says it is quite impossible for him to put the loose shelves into their places while the books are on the ground. Of course it is, I quite see. I saw as we were doing it but couldn’t stop. I’ve laid down Osbert’s book,32 which I’m adoring, in order to read the sequel to Miss Blandish33 – The Flesh of the Orchid. It’s horrible and I don’t enjoy it nor does it affect me, but what’s started has to be finished and there is so much to be read. David Cecil has a new book about Lady Dorothy Osborne, and there are some memoirs by Harold Acton and some more by Maurice Rostand.
Mazout is installed but is too thick for the pipe, so clogs daily and the water tepid in consequence.
Train to Paris (shaky)
May 11th, 1948
The domestic situation got worse and I got obsessed to madness. Jean, maître d’hôtel to the rescue. I rang his wife who told me he was in a place not greatly to his liking. I met him secretly at the Berkeley. He was looking exceedingly good and well dressed and I took him for a drive and was able to persuade him to chuck all and follow me. So he promised to find a cook, a valet and a maid for me. An immense load lifted from my aching mind.
I still had the horror of breaking the news to the sackees. Papa undertook to tell André and I had Henriette the redoubtable uneatable cook to tell. It is all to be realised in ten days, in fact next Monday, and Jean is to run the house completely
Miss Fry of 69 Rue de Lille informs me that the cow and four pigs will arrive at 10 p.m. on a certain evening. ‘Oh no, Miss Fry’ I moaned, ‘that will mean midnight and how shall I cope with feeding and milking in the dark with a cross gardener?’ She telephoned Normandy to tell them to start at dawn instead but they were already en route. Everyone went to bed except me, who stayed all night fully dressed in the drawing room, dozing lightly enough to hear a moo or a honk through the wide-open door. Of course they didn’t come till nine next morning so that Papa and everyone else could say ‘What did I tell you?’
The four pigs (one a hermaphrodite) squealed the place down as they were dragged by the ears and tails from the van to their poky little sty. The cow on the other hand, covered in her own dung in which she had been stewing for twenty hours, walked out with great dignity and, reaching her welcoming straw-laid stall, threw herself down to get the weight off her poor feet. She’s very small, very thin and is as gentle as a sleepy baby – tiny undangerous horns, a very pale face with panda eyes. We tethered her out the next day and she gives quite a tidy drop of milk, but O the squalid filth of all equipment. I can’t buy a three-legged stool, nor a cream skimmer, nor big bowls for the milk, nor a measuring jug, nor muslin to cover the pans if there were any, nor a churn. I give her nothing extra in the way of food. The pigs I feed with troops-repudiated porridge, ‘processed peas’ and what paltry swill we have.
Embassy news. Mrs Walker34 came down for the afternoon to borrow all my flower vases for the Embassy royal visit and to grab three rolls of wallpaper (mine) because there has been an accident in Princess Elizabeth’s room and it will take enough rolls of paper to repair it as will not leave enough to paper a room of mine. This grievance sank into insignificance when she told me that Harvey has had the dark green library curtains taken down and stored and the dark green carpet taken up and cut up for passage and bathrooms, and has replaced them with beige. I cannot tell you how this has shocked and hurt me. I am going to write a stinger to the Office of Works. I cannot think how they could have allowed it on expense, or how the Harveys could have done anything so dastardly. It seems to me as bad as if I had the Pauline Borghese chairs covered in navy blue. That room was made and designed by the best artist Bérard, the best entrepreneur Geffroi and the best dilettante Bestegui. It was passed by us to house the present of a library and that those ignorant Harveys can have had the nerve to touch it entirely passes forgiveness. He never uses the room himself and as the lending library book has been sent to us, I suppose no one goes into it or borrows from the shelves. I feel inclined to take an oath not to enter the Embassy during their tenure but I suppose at Papa’s insistence I shall have to go as a cure-dent35 next Saturday for the Princess Elizabeth reception.
General de Gaulle’s brother Pierre, the Mayor of Paris, is asking a party of notabilities to a famously beautiful old palace in the Cité – Hôtel de Lauzun. Princess Elizabeth is the guest of honour. The host sent a list of guests to the Embassy, not for vetoing but as a polite gesture. Imagine his surprise and rage when, as a Gaullist, he is called upon by that ass Peter Hope36 and told that several of those invited the Princess cannot meet, on account of their collabo[rationist] tendencies. I should have thought the de Gaulles would know which collabos they had forgiven.
May 17th, 1948
Things haven’t got any better yet. The horrible staff took their dismissed departure on Saturday – Georges promising to return as soon as he had got his things out of Thérèse’s flat, but I very much fear that when she realises that he has lied to her about leaving our employ she will terrify him into chucking us. Then I shall have those two cars on my hands again to remember to oil and to fill, to inflate and to garage. Jean is supposed to go to Chantilly with his équipe today so perhaps now is the tide’s turn, but where is the enthusiasm and effort I used to summon? I can’t find it anywhere – not on that lovely lake where the swan is nesting, nor in this free and labour-saving flat. The dirt and the difficulties blot out the sun and the birds and the fresh forest and the interest of the streets.
So they cut the library carpet and the curtains up, since I heard of which I am making no more pretence about the Harveys. I wanted not to go to the ball.37 Papa insisted, but the frights got the frozen mit – not a smile broke from me. The festivities are nil – a few perfunctory flags on Mappin & Webb and Molyneux and W. H. Smith and not much else. The English colony, from which list they omit any compatriots we know, i.e. Nancy, Alvilde, de Benderns, Violet Trefusis38, etc., got together in the courtyard at 10 a.m. as she drove in from the ferry trip in a tightly closed car with Royal Standard on top. She brought the car and that ass Harvey never said ‘Make it an open one’ so nobody saw her at all except when she chug-chugged down the Seine to the Ile St. Louis. No one we knew was asked to the Elysée, which I’m told was well done in my tradition of candles and mystère, but the guests were pretty dull for them – Schumanns, Bidaults and the rest of them. No one we knew was asked to the Trianon lunch, so it’s difficult to get much lowdown.
It was agreed by frogs and limeys that she opened the exhibition with grace and faultless French poise and charm of manner. The Duke is painfully bald, a few years will show him an egg. I could find no one asked to the reception but we rolled up to the Embassy at eleven. Old gatekeeper Christie tried to hustle our car on and got a barbed rocket from Papa. Into the Kings & Queens39 where the gloomy hosts stood looking ghastly under the deforming light of a much brighter chandelier. The dining room had been used for dinner but was closed afterwards (the Borghese candelabra had been suppressed and no candles allowed). This left the ballroom as buffet and the smaller rooms and gallery in which to circulate. They had a band with a highbrow and no doubt beautiful programme but they’d thought it prudent to place it in the cul-de-sac of the dining-room side of the gallery. You saw the musicians sawing and bowing away but no sound came through the double glass wall and across the gravel garden piece (unfloodlit of course, in spite of the roof equipment I lent them). The flowers were rather reminiscent of the Dorchester because Major Lees40 had sent for a Constance Spry hand from London. I did not think it a bad plan and she’d made a splendid, if a bit hackneyed, job of it, but the French reaction was ‘You would never have done such a thing, now would you? Do they think the French have no art or craft?’ In spite of all I enjoyed the party enormously. I liked not smiling at the Harveys, I had a sensational reception from the dear staff. So lovely the girls looked, so handsome the men – Virginia [Millard], Barley, Ann [Clarke], Mavis [Coulson], Hazel [Richards], Ashley, Brooks [Richards],
Peter and Hellis Tennant, Sir Guy and Lady Salisbury Jones (Military Attaché), the beautiful Vaniers, all saying the thing to please me most. Lots to drink, rather nasty eats. The Princess looked really very pretty and acted gracefully and with charm. When I think in the last generation the difficulty of laughing Princess Mary (the King’s sister) off!
May 26th, 1948
Eric’s [Ducannon] party for the Princess was memorable for its horror. ‘Qui sont tous ces vieux pompons?41 said Odette Pol Roger. The house in which the party was jammed had no garden outlet and belonged to his aunt, Madame de Neuflize. She had flung some withered blooms, sent up cheaply from the Nice market, in hideous colour combinations, and lit the dark room with a ray of electric light on corner tables. It was the hottest day of the year and there were three hundred guests. The Princess changed her dress and looked cucumber cool, the Duke, who had been poisoned at the Embassy, was like a rag. They had been lunching with the President’s wife at Fontainebleau and had then sight-seen Vaux-le-Vicomte, a house so big that Louis XIV had the noble who built it disgraced for daring to vie with his king in splendour of palace. Her feet must have hurt. He spent his party in the loo.
The Twedes brought Baroness Blixen, Danish author of almost my favourite books, to lunch at Chantilly. I have no more servant complex. Jean has made all Sir Garnet for twice the price and well worth it. Maria and Angelo and Mireille sing at their work. The food is good. Cream naturally abounds. The place is as clean as it can be with workmen still neither in nor out. Pictures are going up. Gooseberries and salads from the garden are all that we can put on the table so far. I suffer shame of wardrobe with Maria. Donald [Mallett] is in severe trouble, in fact sacked by that archfiend Harvey, for going to look at the bedroom Princess Elizabeth was to occupy. It’s an outrage – the Comptroller Lees had given permission. He hopes to get a better job with the 16 Nations or Marshall distribution and leave with a high head.
Sunday, French Derby Day
June 13th, 1948
I’m going to write to you now whatever happens. The only way of stealing the time to do so is by letting them all go to the races and staying leaning against a small haystack, made by Stephan, the Czech aide-jardinier. (Damn, I hear Melanie, the cow mooing – does it mean that I must rush her to the bull?) Back again after Operation Melanie – not bulling, I fear, but thirst. So now I’m sitting on another heap of hay from which she is eating. I’ve got the end of her very short rope gripped in my little finger and the tug and position and fear of pats and of her mounting over me is hell, so are flies, spiders and the cow’s amorous lickings. They all, as I say, have gone to the races. I did it last Sunday and swore ‘never again’. ‘They all’ were the Aga Khan and Begum (a big girl), Bill Patten and a pretty French jeune fille who curtseys to her seniors, Daphne Bath and Rufus, house guests. My hands are so swollen it’s difficult to manipulate the pencil, just as the shoes were such a problem to my last year’s feet. Is it milking? Sorting out swill? Tin opening? Heart? Dropsy? Or what? Impossible to say.
IN JUNE OR early July 1948 I passed out of HMS Ceres as a fully fledged Writer. I went first to my home base at Chatham, to kick my heels until the Navy found something for me to do. I longed, naturally, to be posted to a proper seagoing ship, or at least to some naval base abroad – Malta perhaps, or Trincomalee, or Hong Kong – but as a National Service man I suspected a year at Scapa Flow to be a good deal more likely. Meanwhile I took a room at a sailors’ hostel – it cost a shilling a night, but at least it gave me a touch of privacy – and it was there, just a week or two later, that I received a posting better than anything I could have dreamt of: to join HMS Cleopatra, a light cruiser at present refitting in Portsmouth in preparation for the projected Home Fleet cruise to the Caribbean in the autumn.
Chantilly
June 24th, 1948
You’ve gone to sea (I hope it will never be to seed) and I’ve thought a lot about you in your hammock, in peril – fierce raged the tempest – sea legs and your timbers shivering. I look forward with uncontrollable impatience for your first letter about life on the ocean wave.42 I shopped unsuccessfully and lunched with Coalbox. Isaiah next me said Winston had woven a long piece after we had left and said (wishful thinking) that there would be war with Russia by August, calling the A Bomb ‘A bomb Tom’ or ‘Tom’ tout court. After lunch, at which my lack of confidence grew as I did not understand anything that was being said, I felt deaf and doltish. Papa and I went to Gentlemen’s Agreement that was so highly praised by the reviews. We took turns to sleep and so saw it all between us, and a more boring, more humourless film I never did see. A nice journey on the ferry and at last back to Chantilly. The downstairs bathroom is stinking of stagnant drains and the carpet saturated and stained with leakage. The cow all but dry under the weak hands of Maria and Stefan. The lilies in full flower and breathtaking, delphiniums too.
Back to Paris to lunch, one wondered why. The weather (unexpectedly) was fine enough to lunch alfresco. For days we had been dreading the arrival of Lord Oxford and his mother, my oldest and once dearest friend.43 I went to collect them that day at Le Bourget and had the good luck to witness the Duca di Verdura (known to friends as Fulco) coming out of the room where passengers are stripped to the skin and all orifices examined for contraband. He was screaming like a jay and swearing never to set foot on France’s vile soil again. It’s the second time in a few weeks that they’ve humiliated him and once they tore Natasha Wilson’s clothes off because she was travelling with him. Katherine is very sweet and intelligent and funny.
Now I’m up to date. Pigs fine, duck fine, cow mooing, Jacques of the Embassy bringing a request from their second chauffeur that he might come to us. He has never valeted but Jean thinks it’s easily taught, and it’s such a pleasure that they want to leave the Embassy for the Chantillians. True, I’d seen him yesterday when I went to collect some leavings and asked him if he knew of anyone about his own age who would like the job. True I elaborated on the charm of the situation, good food, foreign travel, smart car etc. etc., and the fish is nibbling. We’ve made a lot of hay but when I said, tottering under the weight of a stack I was lifting, ‘Do you think the cow will eat this hay?’ Stefan said ‘Je ne le crois pas.’ I’m doomed to live among pessimists.
We buy butter in the black market and vegetables at insane prices and yet we have a cow and a huge potager.44 It can’t go on like this.
I looked in on Chips in London and found the Duchess of Kent, her sister Countess Toren, the reigning Prince and Princess of Liechtenstein, the Ranee of Kapurthala and the King of Egypt’s sister. It was like a stamp album.
Chantilly
July 31st, 1948
It’s near a week since you left me. Breccles45 was sadder after you left – sinister sad. Poor vital Venetia brought to this little measure! It used to be a retreat of fun for me and Papa. He came back from the war for his first leave46 and by letters to the trenches and from them we had settled to marry if he survived. He never went back to the battle (or on me) for while there in early November 1918 we heard the Kaiser had abdicated and the next day it was Peace. But the latter half of the war and for fifteen years after it was a habitual and favourite house – comfort, beauty, gaiety, friends, romance, fireworks, shoots, picnics, rest and this last visit was like an old woman looking in a glass and seeing her youth’s radiance. Very agonising. In future (near future) I’m going to carbon paper my diary so that Vinny [Venetia] may hear a little of our lives.
July 26th. Unnecessary to tell you that I had a hideous day in London. Papa had fixed himself a lover’s lunch with Caroline. I having ne’er a love got a nephew in the shape of Raimund to give me half his lunch interval on the terrace of the Dorchester and Chips welcomed me to coffee. It was too hot for my dark blue woollen dress and I felt sordid and unworthy of anything better than Mr. Hart of Liverpool Street. I got so hot and cross during the interview that I began to unbutton, in fact undress like the very mad. Mr. Hart mumbled something about strip teasing and
that made me hotter and smellier (I have a theory that rage as well as fear makes your sweat glands smell). There was nothing I suggested that could be effected. I must let Bognor furnished for three years to cover rent, gardener, Wade, repairs and then you will be twenty-one and I can give it to you, and not dare to die for another five years, and when it’s yours I’ll have to settle money to bring you another £500 p.a. and that will mean that much off my income and we’ll not be able to live in France and I and Papa will be driven home to your seaside shack and ask for shelter, and your beastly tart-wife will be like Goneril and Regan merged and bang the flimsy door in our noses, and we’ll get a sheer hulk on Pagham or Bosham Marsh as Peggotty did before us, and Papa will make love to the paid help and I will be the real Mrs. Gummidge. So I said to Mr. Hart I never wanted to see his features again and I left buttoning my bodice and buckling on my belt and took myself to Mr. Mock the chiropodist who whittled my gnarled feet into pink feathers and restored equilibrium without chasing Melancholia. Then there was tea at Liz’s and plans made to motor to Basle next week and claim my last year’s thefts, and then on to Venice because Korda47 is showing three films in the Festival – The Winslow Boy, a Graham Greene short story and Spring in Park Lane. Then we shall come back with perhaps a day or two at Portofino for me and the same for Papa at Opio. Doesn’t it sound lovely, but all looks to me stale and unprofitable and sad.
The ferry brought us over. We had a memorably nasty dinner and walked up on deck to see the stars and the cranes and other people laughing and now it’s next day, the 27th, and I’ve done the dentist and the rations and a modiste and gulped back a Pernod alone at our station pub and uncombed my hair and come home.
