Darling Monster

by Diana Cooper

  Nancy Rodd is in residence, calm and cool and elegant. The cow’s a skeleton, the pigs far from thrifty, Colorado Beetle everywhere. Oklahoma48 the only solace. Jean out of hand, Jacques covered with blind boils and incapable of work, Mireille crossish, Maria grovelling and talking such nonsense about a dying duckling and about not having the right to kill it, i.e. take life.

  28th. Today blew in Mr. Peter Coats49 and Mr. Cornflakes,50 the editor of Town & Country. His main subject was ‘the Duchess’ (not Kent – Windsor) but they made lunch quite gay and like mad dogs we all swallowed quickly and all tore off to a most remarkable house called Raray about fifteen kms away – empty so that I was able to salvage some scraps – and of a fantasy unparalleled – two long and high walls forming a court in front of the magnificent house on the top of which is a stag hunt (formalised) in stone silhouetted upon the sky, not bas relief. It was photographed in La Belle et la Bête.51 Then quickly in the opposite direction, to Poissy – an appointment with Madame Galéa, the woman who has the house of toys at Auteuil. She was the mistress of a famous dead art dealer called Vollard and inherited among many hundred canvases 300 Renoirs – three or four of herself. She always says ‘Ils sont un peu partout’52 but I suspect her of keeping them in a cellar so as not to have to insure them which would give their number and worth away to the bloodsuckers. She’d come down to her hideous newly acquired riverside Edwardian residence to receive us with her dame de compagnie. She’s quite old and is off to Geneva with an exhibition of toys and to Amsterdam with another of antique dresses, and a lot of her pictures have gone to the Edinburgh Festival. The house is full of hideosities and beauties. She is not a giver, except when it comes to a goûter and then she’s profligate – tea, unending cakes, a porto flip, some chocolates, champagne and no ‘nos’ taken. Sick to the stomach, we left her and her hydrangeas and lobelias and her John Brown gardener and drove glutted back to Papa and a light dinner.

  August 1st. Picnic day. It wasn’t A PATCH on last year’s when you were there. We put hats on the busts and the food was scrumptious – profiteroles stuffed with egg, rice and foie gras. The Pattens brought ham and Jerry Koch and then there was crème-en-coeur and fruit juice and vin rosé and Barley. Our own depressing crowd made our numbers nine. I had a wicked headache brought on by storm and by Jean who let out to me in the kitchen saying that he couldn’t go on, that he was never off his legs, never had a day off, never had any money, never slept, couldn’t eat. It destroyed, for ever, all my confidence in him. It was nonsense of course – he is not overworked a bit when Jacques isn’t covered in carbuncles and if he is, he only has to hustle around and find the valet-chauffeur we are all hoping for. I’d told him the night before I had £60 in the house to pay the month’s wages, and as to his days off he’s perpetually having two or three when we go to London. I expect it was the heat and the thunder but it was a shock. Maria says he’s always cross and so is Jacques and that since the war all men are unendurable, that the camps and the travail forcé and being soldiers or resisters, and the marché noir with all its temptations and the fact that women did everything, has entirely demoralised them for ever. Even Jacques’s carbuncles are part of the male break-up. She’s not far wrong. Maria has been maddening about the deformed runtish little duckling. It died today after three days of lying unconscious on a hot water bottle. She is sobbing her silly heart out, while I rejoice. Jean has caught an ordinary rabbit and has set it up in a cage of wire and deal on the lovely grass slope. Maria’s ducklings in another with their nappies and bottles and trays make the place like a smallholder’s Peacehaven home.

  Pam Berry came, scintillating and enthusiastic and gay and thick about the waist and very old-looking. Lots of dreadful stories about Randolph in America. He chose in his cups to go to bed upon a glass table in Herbert Swope’s house and went through it. Now I’m off with the lesbian Madame Hubin to buy cow cake.

  August 4th. Melanie wouldn’t eat the cow cake. No letter from you.

  * * *

  1 The royal family were preparing to visit Australia and New Zealand in HMS Vanguard in early 1949. In the event it was cancelled owing to the King’s health.

  2 One of the several Orders of Knighthood bestowed in recognition of service. There are three grades: Commander (CMG – ‘Call me God’ ), Knight Commander (KCMG – ‘The King calls me God’) and Knight Grand Cross (GCMG – ‘God calls me God’).

  3 By T. S. Eliot.

  4 Mrs Laura Corrigan, American socialite determined to take English society by storm.

  5 Of the château stables.

  6 How can one not notice losing a snow boot?

  7 As we now know, my father’s.

  8 But alas, I’ve got flu.

  9 Fashionable portrait painter, wife of the composer Georges Auric.

  10 Odette Pol Roger, of the champagne family, later greatly admired by Winston Churchill, who claimed to drink no other brand.

  11 April Fool.

  12 The highly unsatisfactory couple whom my parents employed.

  13 She often did patchwork of an evening.

  14 The letters have so many mentions of the purchase of a purple umbrella that I think it must be a catchphrase – perhaps the last item listed in the game ‘I went to market and I bought . . .’ which we played endlessly when I was a child.

  15 Wrapped up. A reference to the ‘mobled queen’ in Hamlet.

  16 Did her patchwork.

  17 Unknown.

  18 After mass.

  19 A quotation from ‘Home on the Range’, one of her favourite songs.

  20 A bar in Chantilly.

  21 The Times crossword was a daily ritual.

  22 So was reading aloud.

  23 ‘You drive me up the wall’, only ruder.

  24 Mrs Gummidge, a character from David Copperfield.

  25 House-moving.

  26 Not to be confused with Desmond MacCarthy, man of letters.

  27 For the Silver Wedding of the King and Queen.

  28 Christian Dior’s New Look had recently reached England.

  29 Viscount Gage, an old friend of the family.

  30 Welsh Labour MP, who as Minister of Health spearheaded the establishment of the National Health Service.

  31 A Bognor cleaning lady.

  32 Probably Great Morning, the third of the five volumes of his autobiography, just published.

  33 No Orchids for Miss Blandish, by James Hadley Chase.

  34 Secretary to the Embassy Comptroller.

  35 After-dinner guest (literally toothpick).

  36 A member of the Embassy staff.

  37 For the visit of HRH Princess Elizabeth.

  38 English femme de lettres, famous for her elopement in 1920–1 with Vita Sackville-West.

  39 A reception room hung with pictures of assorted monarchs.

  40 Walter Lees, the Embassy Comptroller.

  41 ‘Who are all those old fogeys?’

  42 This was to be delayed another three months. Cleopatra remained in dry dock until September.

  43 Katherine Asquith.

  44 Vegetable garden.

  45 Breccles Hall, Norfolk, home of Venetia Montagu.

  46 This was in 1918.

  47 My father’s friend, Sir Alexander Korda, had made him official representative of the British Film Producers’ Association at the Venice Film Festival.

  48 Then the fashionable card game.

  49 Long-time companion of Chips Channon.

  50 Kellogg, perhaps?

  51 Film by Jean Cocteau.

  52 ‘They’re all over the place.’

  10

  ‘I told him to imagine I was Winston Churchill’

  ON THE MOVE, AUGUST 1948–APRIL 1949

  San Fernando, Trinidad,

  8th October, 1948

  Our first entrance to the West Indies was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. In the early morning of brilliant sunlight, we drifted quite slowly & noiselessly through a thousand tiny islands, roc
ky and wooded, set in a dark blue sea on which we could see four or five tiny white sailing boats. The sun and the blue and the total lack of any sign of human habitation on our first land for sixteen days made an absolutely staggering impression. There can have been no difference in the scene when Columbus saw it five hundred years ago.

  We dropped anchor at about nine in San Fernando bay, which became in a flash covered with little rowing boats of curious locals. Then the Mayor and all the authorities came on board to greet us, all in immaculate white tropical suits. Trinidad is the most cosmopolitan of all the West Indies. As well as blacks and whites, they have browns, yellows, greens, reds and even an occasional and unaccountable orange. There are Chinese and Indians and Malays and people of nondescript Eurasian origin all jumbled together. The Mayor is Chinese, a double blue at Edinburgh University.

  After half an hour or so the official programme of events and entertainments came on board. It staggered everyone. For the nine days we are here our proposed amusements, tours, dances, parties and entertainments fill about ten full-size foolscap sheets when listed. Every day there are about eight alternative projects. ‘Tennis for thirty-eight ratings at Pointe-à-Pierre Club. Equipment provided. On to Waterloo Club for tea, cocktails, social evening and dance’, or alternatively ‘Tour of McBean Sugar Plantation for 150 ratings’.

  And so it goes on, with invitations and proposals right and left. For officers and ratings, Trinidad has done better than any other island within memory. And this is San Fernando only. The mind baulks at the thought of what Port of Spain has got on for the rest of the Fleet, but it couldn’t be better than here.

  All love,

  John Julius

  WHEN MY FATHER left the Embassy, his old friend Sir Alexander Korda invited him to be the official representative of the British Film Producers’ Association at the annual Venice Film Festival. My father had never taken so much as a photograph in his life, but Korda reassured him: his job would be simply to show the flag, to preside at the occasional reception or dinner, and – naturally – to attend all the prestige showings of new British films. In return he and my mother would be accommodated, as guests of the BFPA, at the Gritti Palace Hotel for the duration of the festival, and would of course be provided with their own personal gondola.

  My parents had always loved Venice – they had gone there every year before the war – and Korda’s offer filled them with joy. The Gritti – which had only just opened – was determined to be Venice’s best hotel; a private gondola was a rare luxury indeed; there were probably not more than half a dozen in the city. But now, as the letters make all too clear, depression struck my mother – as bad, I think, as she had ever suffered. ‘Melancholia’, as she called it, had always been the bane of her life. She worked hard to conceal it from the outside world but never made any secret of it to my father or to me. True, she had a reason; my father was obviously far from well, though whether he was half as ill as she imagined we shall never know.

  In the second week of August, while I was still in Portsmouth impatiently waiting for my ship to get out of dry dock, they set off for Venice, stopping – as they always did – at their favourite hotel in the world, the Locanda di San Vigilio on the shore of Lake Garda. Kept by a permanently half-sozzled Irishman called ‘Leonardo’ Walsh (whom they loved), it was simple in the extreme: the beds were rock-hard and there were no en suite bathrooms – not that this mattered very much, since the hot water was distinctly dodgy. But the little sixteenth-century arcaded building with its shaded terrace and its cypress trees breathed a quiet and peaceful perfection; and if your window looked out – as mine usually did – on the tiny little harbour to one side, you would wake up in the morning to find it almost blocked by a huge, flapping, tawny sail, belonging to the fishing boat which had come in with the dawn. Moreover Leonardo was a first-rate cook, and the food – mostly fish straight out of the lake – could hardly have been bettered.

  Whether the melancholia overclouded even San Vigilio I have no means of telling; normally she was happier there than anywhere. But it certainly kicked in when they reached Venice, and was no better when they returned briefly to Lake Garda a few days later. It was not until they were back in France that the clouds finally lifted.

  Another name that crops up with some frequency in this chapter is that of Nancy Rodd, née Mitford. She had settled in Paris after the war in order to be close to Gaston Palewski. He was General de Gaulle’s right-hand man with an irreproachable war record, who was later to be the French Ambassador in Rome; but he was far from good-looking, and as a womaniser in a class by himself. Still, Nancy loved him, even though her affection was all too seldom rewarded. We used to see a lot of her; she would come round for lunch, dinner or a drink and was always wonderful company – as was her sister Debo Hartington,1 a frequent visitor. (Another sister, Diana, married to the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and imprisoned with him throughout the war, my father refused to have in the house.)

  Chantilly

  August 4th, 1948

  I’ve just had a telegram from Judy saying our Venetia is dead – died after four peaceful unconscious days. She was a good friend and very fond of us and she had a lot to bear, so no grief. I think we made her last years happier with Embassy jaunts. She liked them better than anyone. I’m writing from Le Bourget sitting in the camionette waiting for Cecil to arrive and incidentally the King of Iran too. Papa and Pam have gone to dine with Susan Mary and the Trees, and Cecil and Nancy and I are going to have a girl’s gossip at home, and tomorrow perhaps come the Hoffs and Saturday or Sunday we’re off to Switzerland. I shall miss you a lot, if I don’t get a word from you before I leave I shall cry.

  The Trees spent last night with us. We were so encumbered what with Pam and Nancy and Louise that I dossed down on the drawing-room sofa. It struck me that Papa, the servants, etc. are so unthoughtful of me that I don’t think they knew or cared where I slept. I’m a cipher and a drudge – it’s my own fault, I know. I cleared out the grate yesterday morning of all the cigarette ends and scraps. The melancholy Jacques staggers down at nine, clutching his carbuncled stomach, clad in a long filthy dirty white coat to his ankles. He looks like a septic Pierrot. I hate him. Too much about the servants and not enough about happiness or uplift.

  Paris is dead except for the fashion buyers and ‘collections’. It’s too hot to look at winter models. Guêpières2 are said to be going out and hobbles coming in.

  August 10th, Geneva. Look what a time since I wrote. I’ll have to recapitulate quick. I let the house3 to David Bruce4 and Evangeline, Virginia’s sister. They’ll only go weekends and pay about £20 a week in dollars. Cecil came, rather bald and grey and low-spirited. The Hoffs came full of pep and Louise, Bébé, Cecil and I lunched at Porquerolles. Bébé’s drug troubles are over thanks to enough strings being pulled round justice’s throat. The juge d’instruction finally fell in love with him and is now seeking to lunch with him.

  So we left it all on a grey day after lunch and motored to the bar near Bar where you and I are remembered. It turned out a peach of a place to be revisited. Next morning off again to lunch at Dole and there to leave my beautifying coat – damn. It was the official patronne who whisked it into the vestiaire out of hand. Over the Faucille with petrol failing – once we made the col I knew I could slide down but the last ascending kms were nerve-racking. Hôtel de la Paix, Mère Royaume, crêpes suzette etc. and bed, and yesterday morning into our wide windows broke a day of splendour and sparkle. There is nowhere like Geneva for an atmosphere of flag-fluttering holiday sans souci. My spirits put wings on at once. I shopped and bought Kitien5 for my maids and nothing for you or Papa. I went to see my lawyer about the old legacy.6 He was away, his stand-in told me the affair was wound up in Switzerland. We were waiting for English decisions. Doomsday next.

  Raimund took us to a distant restaurant in a garden. Papa had a tummy upset and couldn’t eat and spoilt my pleasure. At 5.30 we set off for Solothurn, a really lovely town – do
you remember it? The drive through Swiss villages satisfied me well. They are really lovely and so secure and solid and sensible. Their wood was neatly cut and piled up for the winter, and their vine for their wine, their row of beans and loft of hay, their wise providence – until it comes to flowers, which they scatter extravagantly out of windows and doors and palings. You know that inside the bread is white and fresh and their butter rich and plentiful. I love it all. This hotel, Die Krone, is first class. The beauty of yesterday is clouded and we are off now to collect my losses from Basle. Papa’s tummy seems more settled. Splendid letter from you. God bless my dear little lubber – don’t shiver your timbers. I’ll try and get refills for our Kimberleys7 but you’ll get them in Jamaica along with rum and doubloons and don’t forget to ask for Pina Fresca – in the streets of Cuba or any island where pineapples are grown. A huge tumbler of iced pineapple juice, well sugared with a head on it.

  Pontresina, near St. Mortiz

  August 11th, 1948

  The Hoffs left us today. It’s been a nice two or three days if only I did not irritate them and Papa at Oklahoma and if only he, Papa, wasn’t a victim of a crise de foie.8 I recovered a lot of stuff at Basle and in the course of it met Carl’s niece at a confiserie. She was introduced to me by the Hoffs as ‘Inez’. Back to me came a memory of 1939 when Carl loved me and was so frightened of this delightful situation being discovered by his protectors that he used to address his letters under cover to Phyllis and asked me to sign mine ta nièce Inez. I naturally thought it was an invention, but there she was, six foot high, stuffing down éclairs. I’m trying so hard to be good and high spirited on this trip, but somehow I’m difficult if you’re not there. The hotels other people like I condemn before I’ve seen the rooms – too high class, too badly lit, and the rest of it.