Darling Monster

by Diana Cooper

  A wonderful night. Slept from ten to eight, in spite of five visits from passport bores. Pam slept till ten and hearing that we should not be in Paris till one, turned over and slept till 12.30.

  Home to Chantilly. Two glorious letters from Trinidad and Tobago. I do so wish I was there. O you dear little boy, keep safe and well and don’t overpunish the rum.

  * * *

  1 Later Duchess of Devonshire.

  2 Wasp waists.

  3 Chantilly.

  4 U.S. Ambassador to France, subsequently to Britain.

  5 Lipstick (le rouge qui tient).

  6 A madman whom she had met only once had left her all his money: but she never got a penny.

  7 A sort of pen.

  8 A liver attack.

  9 ‘In this palace there are parties every night.’

  10 American writer. Author of Inside Europe, Inside Asia, Inside Africa, etc.

  11 Charlie Bestegui (or Beistegui) a Mexican multimillionaire, famous for the sumptuous fancy-dress ball he was to give in Venice in September 1951.

  12 Winston and Clemmie’s daughter.

  13 ‘I am.’

  14 From the nineteenth-century German children’s book Struwwelpeter.

  15 Nickname of the film director Anthony Asquith.

  16 Indigent old man, of a kind then widespread in Italy, who did odd jobs for tips. The Casteletto was on the topmost peak above the village.

  17 An Austrian neighbour at lunch once asked her whether she ‘scribed her day-book’. She never forgot it.

  18 Long-distance.

  19 It wasn’t. At this time she was engaged on Love in a Cold Climate.

  20 Ironmonger.

  21 The Buffet de la Gare at Chantilly was a favourite watering hole of my father, who rather fancied the red-haired patronne. The Golden Arrow was the Paris–London express which hurtled through the station at full speed, so a visit to the bar was always described as watching the Golden Arrow go through, or checking that it was on time.

  22 ‘Some port, monsieur?’ ‘That’s what I like best.’

  23 Strikes.

  24 ‘There’s no choice.’

  25 He was really a high-class economist.

  26 A distinguished barrister, then working at SHAFF.

  27 Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine, which Hilaire Belloc had dedicated to my father.

  28 Phrase taken from an ancient Baedeker.

  29 Emulate.

  30 Rationing – unbelievably, nearly three and a half years after the end of the war – was still in force.

  31 His mother.

  32 Clearly a quotation, but where from?

  33 In the corridor of the Dorchester, where she had her room.

  34 The house of the Vilmorin family just outside Paris.

  35 Ludwig Bemelmans, writer.

  36 Pope Pius XII.

  37 Beautifully dressed.

  38 Anglesey, soon to be married.

  39 Deborah, soon to be Duchess of Devonshire.

  40 Conrad Russell’s sisters.

  41 Put on her Sunday best.

  42 The Browning Version and Harlequinade.

  43 Paget (later Farrell), twin sister of Henry Anglesey, about to marry Shirley Morgan.

  44 The wedding was that of my mother’s nephew, Henry Anglesey, to Shirley Morgan, daughter of Charles Morgan the novelist. Kitty, Rose, Caroline and Liz were all his sisters.

  45 Glass engraver, brother of Rex.

  46 Four-leaf clovers, her emblem.

  47 The Hassler.

  48 Lady Altrincham. The Altrinchams were the other British couple on the Wagon-Lits board.

  49 ‘I was seized by a sort of drunkenness of independence. No more roads, no more towns, no more monarchy, no more republic, presidents, kings, people!’

  50 Slitted ears.

  51 ‘Indeed, I never saw such caperings. M. Violet, holding his violin between his chin and his chest, tuned his fatal instrument. He then shouted to the Iroquois “Take your places, gentlemen!” and the whole party jumped around like a pack of demons.’

  52 Her mother.

  53 ‘We are very, very important.’

  54 ‘Obligatory, but most unpleasant.’

  55 Draught.

  56 Pius XII, then Pope.

  57 Poem by Browning.

  58 ‘Miss you sweet. My love to Jenny Alex. It’s cold. Do send me news’

  59 Pamela (Mrs Randolph) Churchill. She had now taken up with the Fiat king Gianni Agnelli.

  11

  ‘You really are a pig-child’

  (FRANCE, MOROCCO, SPAIN, NOVEMBER 1948–APRIL 1949)

  Cleopatra

  South-west of Lisbon

  3rd February, 1949

  On Monday morning we sailed and we’ve been sailing ever since. Tomorrow morning we arrive and dock at 1 o’clock. Up until this evening, when the wind and sea got boisterous, it has been the calmest passage to Gibraltar anyone can remember. For four days there have been no clouds, and it has got steadily warmer – yesterday afternoon almost sunbatheable. The Captain’s Office, however, has been all the time a hive of industry. First we completely repainted the office from the duck-egg blue we put on in August to a light cream. The office is in consequence brighter, though of unusual appearance owing to our having had time for only one coat, so that great patches of blue show through the thin bits. We like to think that this subtle blueness lends distinction to the office. It doesn’t.

  No sooner was the paint dry (yesterday morning) than we started an appalling job – the re-entering of every rating’s Conduct Sheet. This is a paper showing all one’s offences, recommendations, punishments, etc., and their Lordships have recently seen fit to redesign it. For two days now we have been copying from the old model to the new for 500-odd men – it’s soul-destroying. Now nearly over, but if we don’t finish it before we arrive and the mail gets in, heaven knows when the last offence will be recorded.

  There has been no other news during the trip except an alarm two nights ago when a stoker was missing, believed overboard. From 2 a.m. till five frantic signals were being made, but then he was found, fast asleep in his hammock, unaware of any fuss, and everybody felt sheepish.

  All love,

  John Julius

  THIS CHAPTER DIVIDES itself up into three parts. The first is taken up with the usual news from London and Paris, further enlivened by the discovery by the press that my mother is ‘in retreat’ at St John and St Elizabeth’s Hospital and its heavy implications that she was there for a face lift – which she might well have been but actually wasn’t.

  The story on see here of dinner guests leaving a house rather than shake hands with Jean Oberlé is a good illustration of the mood which still prevailed in Paris for several years after the end of the war. During our Embassy days, one of the most difficult problems my parents had to face was who had and who had not been a collaborator. Some were known to have been dyed-in-the-wool, others had been, equally undeniably, heroes of the resistance; but there was a broad penumbral zone to which, in all probability, the vast majority of French men and women belonged.

  The last two parts are devoted to my mother’s accounts of two memorable foreign jaunts, the first to Morocco, the second to Spain, to stay with the Duke of Alba in Seville for Holy Week. My father was not present on the first jaunt – I have no doubt to his intense relief; on the second he was, but, as we shall see, had good reason to regret it. My mother rather fancied herself as an expert on North Africa. She had after all lived for eight months in Algiers, and had returned there at least once with Bloggs Baldwin and me. Clearly, however, she could not compete with the distinctly tiresome former mistress of El Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakesh.

  Chantilly

  November 3rd, 1948

  I’m back home, not particularly glad. I do so hate the maîtresse de maison1 life. I like to be a queen or a tramp – the house books, the staff, the difficulties overwhelm me and keep me tossing at night. Khaki Campbells2 are laying – I hear them quacking in tri
umph this early morning. Melanie3 gives a gesture of milk. Piggy never comes on heat. Regnier has put most of his working time and all his greenhouse space into rearing wilted chrysanthemums – la fleur des morts.4 They stuffed the house with them and then automatically whisked them off to the cemetery for the dead – and unknown dead at that. Yesterday we had the jour des morts,5 and Maria won’t wash sheets on that day as it becomes shroud-washing, she says.

  Chantilly

  November 5th, 1948

  Please to remember, and a quiet one but a funny one. Caroline (French pronunciation) is what the staff have christened my pig. She has never shown any stirrings of love, no restlessness, no anxious honking for Hoggy – but, marriage bells in my ears, I got her with help and no trouble to enter her bridal trailer, and Enid and I dragged her in placid mood to M. Lamère, the other side of Lamorlaye. I’d made a kind of rendezvous with him a month ago, but today a furious daughter (the kind that will grow up into a tricoteuse of the Communists) shouted through the upper window that the boar had been castrated. Nothing doing – get the hell out! We managed to get the address of another farmer out of her unfriendliness – and jolly unfriendly it was, for he lived a long way the other side of Champlatreux and his boar had been liquidated. So we bumped poor Caroline back.

  Then she was bucketed off again, this time du côté de chez Senlis, where M. Bouchet was said to breed pigs. Not he but his brother had a big farm the other side of Ermenonville and there was a boar there. He’d seen it with his own eyes. The day was drawing most beautifully to its close – new moon and rosy flushes. M. Bouchet’s brother was out – from the tone of his farm-hands, he was an ogre. We waited in fear. ‘Fi fo fum’ were his first words, his second were to the effect that he had a fine boar but he wasn’t going to let it touch my sow. Diseases might be passed. I cajoled him into at least looking at her clean health. I assured him that she had never seen any other pigs but her brothers. He was obstinate in his negativism. But as soon as I gave it up remorse smote him and he said that if the pig was in condition to mate he’d allow a crack. ‘Ah, I’m jolly sure she’s not,’ I said, ‘I hope you will keep her till she is.’ ‘Not on my life.’ He then softened and warmed to me in telling of how useless she would be as a mother, teats bang wrong and unformed and sterile. His advice was to fatten her up and sell her for Christmas, and that advice I shall follow. We got home in darkness having given poor Piggy a tiring, costly and abortive wedding trip of eighty kms.

  November 6th. So I saw the Joneses off to Dieppe at nine. I did my chores, collected Jenny, paused at the Marché aux Puces.6 buying a coiffeuse,7 a piece of bottle-green velvet for shoes and a bag of hot chestnuts. Jenny bought a red silk umbrella and caught an unattractive cold. ‘Five pounds wasn’t much to give for the lampshade of a lifetime’ is her latest overheard remark; but the briefest and most terrible I’ve ever heard is one waiter passing another and whispering ‘He’s eaten it.’

  November 7th. Such a wonderful day too, leaves still glowing and cloudless skies. Papa and Jenny and I went to pick up young Oboe Godley and to see the Golden Arrow pass. I opened the car and thought ‘I hope we don’t have an accident – not in these clothes’, for Jenny wore the loudest of scarlet jackets over a blinding orange tartan skirt. I was in a get-up rather different from the usual – violent green wool stockings, high platform soles, mid-length corduroy trousers and usual Kabile straw hat over wimple. Papa beat the band in a white jacket, lemon and white check waistcoat, pink carnation and little Gorblimey hat. Peter Rodd joined us for lunch in a waistcoat that had belonged to Harry Cust of red and gold thread, hand-embroidered.

  November 8th. Misty rain. They want Papa to lecture in the U.S.A. for two months, October and November next year, and he’s considering it. Wasn’t it delightful about Truman?8 I who only knew Dewey through Don Iddon,9 who describes him as a robot, am delighted that cold and perfect machinery should break down, and plodding little flesh and blood shouldn’t.

  The Duchess of Windsor went to see Susan Mary and told her she had lost her joie de vivre, that buying clothes and jewels no longer interested her, all was stale and unprofitable, that all she had ever had was energy and without energy she’d lose the Duke, and then she fell a-crying and a-boo-hooing. Poor Wallis.

  Chantilly

  November 13th, 1948

  I haven’t written for several days. Paris isn’t conducive with the painters in. I want to make the flat nice for your holidays and for Papa to live in while I do a retreat after your holidays. Juliet is here to help and to madden. Both bays of the gravel decorated with box and clipped privet are dug up, so is the immediate path in front. Lorries of earth are driven away and other lorries full of another kind of earth are due to arrive. By spring we shall have it all grass, with a much narrower path and beds round the house for flowers, rosemary, lilies, catmint, etc., and on the blanker walls an explosion of roses (I hope). M. Catelot undertakes it, a nurseryman from Chantilly, over-suave in cycling knickers and leather jacket. We are also tearing up all the barren shrubs – dead, diseased and mutilated by Felix. These are to be replaced by healthy, large, free-flowering specimens that will glow in summer and flush in autumn and asphyxiate us with their incense – at least that’s the idea. It’s when forming these plans that I would like to strangle Juliet for her outpourings of Latin-named suggestions. It impresses M. Catelot. He and she spouted for three and a half hours yesterday. It’s made more tedious because the Latin is differently pronounced in French and English. Jenny left and Barley came, fresh and blooming from ten days of pneumonia. She’s never looked better or prettier. She’s to convalesce here for a fortnight.

  Last night we dined with the Windsors – all right. My lost rank has its advantages – I don’t have to sit next to the Duke. The party was pretty, in the Ritz’s best suite, candles and the choicest flowers, caviar, vodka, Wallis looking her very best in off-the-ground white and gold lamé, clipped with two new gigantic yellow diamonds, the whole surmonté10 and panaché11 by the faithful Bahamian Negro in fine gold livery.

  The night before that I dined at Paul-Louis Weiller’s. Bébé and Denise Bourdet took me to the rue de la Faisanderie, where the front door opened on to P.L.W. regretfully saying goodbye to a lady I nearly recognised and a husband I did not. She quickly explained that she had been looking forward to dinner, but as Jean Oberlé was among the guests she could not sit down. ‘Mal éleveé,’12 I thought, if you accept your host you must accept his guests. When we got upstairs Suzy Solidor13 was being pacified in a corner of the room. She also had been on the way out for the same reason. Jean Oberlé was one of the ‘Trois amis’ who broadcast from London during the war, and he has certainly called almost every public figure a collabo.14 They all were so, but naturally they don’t like it set down and rubbed in.

  Drinks and nuts arranged everything, and to my great surprise looking round I noticed that those I had seen the door close on were back, and punishing the vodka. You can guess the conversation. ‘We’ll never get a taxi.’ ‘All the restaurants will be shut – it’s so late and I’ve only got 500 francs.’ All this said by the Dutch husband who hadn’t been called a traitor, so he won and back they came to guzzle. The lady was the mistress of El Glaoui, King of the Atlas, and I’ve accepted an invitation to go with her (bringing David Herbert and you in my wake) to Morocco next year – Moors at their most lavish and fantastic, feasts and slaves, dancing and concubines, gazelles and méchoui.15

  November 15th. Unto us a son is born.16 I’ve just heard it from Alvilde on the buzzer. I’m sorry it’s not a princess. You’ll be firing your guns off, I suppose. The Windsors lunched yesterday. He told me the oldest possible chestnut as something new, i.e. ‘If it’s a boy they’ll fire twenty-one guns, if it’s a girl they’ll fire ten, if it’s a “miss” they’ll fire the Duke of Edinburgh.’ I heard the story first told when Lady Lampson was to have a baby, her Lord being twenty-five years older than her, but then it ended ‘if it’s twins they’ll fire the A.D.C.’. We sat dow
n fourteen – including a most amusing new friend called Leigh Fermor.

  November 20th, 1948

  Papa had left his guns in England last time we were there. He knew it was silly and I told him not to be lazy, but lazy he wanted to be. Every week I have suggested that someone should bring them over, and always he couldn’t be bothered to organise the bringing although he knew the chasse en Alsace17 was drawing near. So (O do take warning, my son) the last few days have been a frenzy of telephoning to Lord Sherwood where the guns lay, to Judy to collect them, to Purdey’s18 to help, to Bobby George19 to fly them. The usual muddle and frustration ensuing the morning of departure – no guns, what’s the good of going, chuck the whole thing. Purdey’s had said that on Lord Sherwood’s orders the guns were sent the day before to Cook’s. Bobby George’s minion called for them only to be told that they had been despatched by air to France. Every plane on the eve was met and searched. Not a gun – nor a line on the loss. Our train to Strasbourg was at 5.30. Rufus, Eric, Sammy Hood were all asked for the loan of their fowling pieces, and a pretty foul lot they were. I said to myself at 3.30 ‘I’m sure they are languishing in a customs shed at Le Bourget.’ Quick, quick in the slow camionette to Air France’s H.Q. in the Champs Elysées. A nice man telephoned O so slowly to Le Bourget, to discover in effect that they were there but couldn’t be released without the requisite papers. That didn’t worry me. In an hour and a half I could wrench them out myself, I thought.

  As soon as I was at the wheel the camionette downed tools, so I had to run a hundred houses to the Travellers’ Club. There I found Rufus, hired a car, minutes gone, tried to telephone Eric – out, Ashley – out, finally made an unknown secretary swear to ring up the Customs and say the Embassy guaranteed the red-tape-snipper. Tremendous sprint by outer boulevards to the airfield – no traffic lights respected – I arrived in hurricane vein and so rattled everyone, who thought I was due for a stroke, that I got the guns out with no message, I think, from the Embassy, in time to be back at the Gare de l’Est with ten minutes to spare. I was glowing with pride but I don’t think anyone else was, least of all Papa.