by Diana Cooper
The processions of the Virgin continued day and night. In the hours of sunlight the candles are eclipsed. The secondary carried catafalque of Christ (either before Pilate or carrying the Cross or the Descent, always a many-figured group) looked a bit Lord Mayor’s Show, but at night they are mystical and beautiful. Papa and I freed ourselves from the kind pomp of the Albas and sneaked into an open fiacre from which one can see the charm and character of the town, the narrow beflowered and freshly whitened trafficless streets round the Alcazar and Royal Palace. It’s a little district where once we lived so long, so long ago.50 The houses look into the miraculous orange-laden gardens of the Moorish-Christian kings and here the fountains still play although because of the drought it is forbidden. The Duke who has every colloquialism and usually gets them pretty right i.e. getting a move on, getting into hot water, narrow shave, etc. will call fountains ‘squirts’ and yesterday describing an orgy he said ‘the champagne flew’, not unnatural but funny to think of bottles whizzing through the air.
It’s more than three days later and there is too much to remember and put on the record. I’m in the train now in the Claret51 district, the grilling sun is I hope ripening the blood of kings. Processions succeeded one another day and night. These gigantic gold and silver altars, much bigger than billiard tables, have to be carried by invisible carriers through needle’s eye doors, so by these doors of their own church, outgoing – the Cathedral their target (ingoing and outgoing) and their own temple (incoming) leaves plenty of dangerous corners. The lower-class districts boast of unrestrained crowds, the applause is deafening. The Blessed Virgin might be Hitler or Sinatra. The extempore singers who bawl a call to prayer song are unheard. With the crack figures from noble churches, the crowds show tenue, total silence and all lights of the street extinguished.
So we found ourselves in a little private room, street level, hired for the nonce. It was Maundy Thursday and even the Duque had come to admire the million candles burning upwards to the jewelled figure. Papa sat on a chair placed on a little platform about three or four foot high, erected to allow a view to those not in the first two rows. Imagine my horror and his pain when to allow of someone pulling his chair further forward, his chair, pushed an inch too far, toppled off with Papa. Darkness, silence – except of course for my groans. I naturally thought him dead. We gathered him up off the stone floor. I could not see his colour or his shape. I did not think of his spine, but his poor nut I felt sure was cracked. He could not speak for a full minute. A doctor, or rather the greatest oculist in the world, the one who puts dead men’s eyes into sockets of the living, was of the party, and by touching pulse and heart and looking to see with a torch if his ears were dribbling proclaimed him alive. Dribbling ears means cracked skull. Breathlessly he said he was all right. Shock had robbed him of speech, and sure enough he recovered enough to stand and even to walk to another passing of the most famous of the Virgins – la Macareña – she goes in at 2.30 p.m. (It was of her that the Spaniard said that he had no faith in God but he believed in the Macareña.) When we at last got in at 3.45 I found Papa’s elbow bleeding superficially, and his side very painful. We half suspected a broken rib and the next morning found him in really acute pain and totally immovable. A doctor was sent for. The Señor Duque was not to be called till eleven, but the young Duque found physicians, father and son. It was horrible to see them turn him over gently, turning him over on the right side52. . . They found two ribs broken and insisted on an X-ray coming to the house. I, thinking of the pesetas, said ‘porque’. They explained in ‘The Game’ language that they must know by a photograph how to strap the patient. A few hours later the operators came with their immense and magical apparatus, but they strapped him in yards of adhesive plaster before the plates were developed. So it was a racket as I had feared. O he did suffer, did Papa, getting up and sitting down and he does still, though less. We went out again that night to see the Virgin of the Gypsies come over the bridge. I went for a nice potter in the afternoon and ate ice creams and sat (by hiring a chair as one used to in the park) in the cool Cathedral.
The four pretty young things who don’t go to bed – Colin Tennant, Mark Chinnery, Caroline Scott53 and Christian Carnegy54 turned up, together with two other very pretty young things – Julian Pitt-Rivers and Pauline, Hermione Baddeley’s daughter by David Tennant. We saw them at the bullfight on Easter Sunday and they, being English and tourists, had naturally found a place for Spanish dancers, so there we repaired from seven to nine and drank sherry and watched not super performers but quite good enough for our unsophisticated eyes, and one girl of such incomparable beauty that I had to take broken Papa there the next day and he was blinded by it. I should tell you too that on one of the procession days I went to a smart enclosure built out before a Government building of sorts. In these boxes, hung with red brocade, all the ladies were in mantillas. The little daughter Duchess could never say the word ‘mantilla’. She called it ‘it’. When would you like to put it on? I shall put it on at six. My aunt is not putting it on. When the moment of putting it on came, two kind black women came, as though to lay me out, with combs and clips and brooches and they plaited strands of my back hair into tiny little snakes and made an intricate fortification that was guaranteed to hold a towering tortoiseshell comb and heavy black mantilla. No flowers they said because Christ hadn’t yet risen, but all the other girls had flowers and bows too. I put it on again with a carnation for the bullfight but it was almost raining and umbrellas were going up and down nervously and I was practically the only one with it on.
In the enclosure where we took Laurian who came to Seville with the Infanta on a jaunt, the lady next to her asked if I was the Queen of Spain. Laurian like a silly said I wasn’t – if only she’d said ‘I think so’ she might have started something. This story put my shares up a lot – others got the wrong ambassadress and told others that Lady Harvey staying with the Duke of Alba and was unexpectedly gay – no end of fun, beflowered and walking the streets, so gay, so sensational (so unlike Lady Harvey). I got very fond of Alba and left him Monday night with regret and resolves to go next year for the fair, if possible with you as I don’t enjoy anything so much without you. Papa had weathered the night pretty well though he looks to be in acute pain. Then it was train time, and a dinner that you couldn’t keep on your plate, so uneven is the permanent way, and a night and a whole day in which I got through a month’s correspondence, and at 11.30 we got to Paris.
Paris was all that can be expected of it in April – sudden wealth, like a woman who wins the grand lot and runs amok. Chestnuts and fountains, splendours of all ages, the river, the shining bridges, the dense greenness of the Bois. There we lunched, in company with Jenny and a new protégé photographer. It wasn’t a great success as Papa had a meeting at three the other side of Paris and looked like it the short fussy time we were there. The food wouldn’t come and it was not happy. Jenny thinner, spottier alas! and going that night to Portofino. I went to see Nancy who had no news, though I gave her a mouthful. I had a bit with Louise. She has been having love dramas in Austrian mountains and with no less a man than Tony Marreco – Ursula’s shake-off.55 She seemed happy and well though starving as per. Another’s love, even if not returned, has its charm to the ageing, as well I know, and she had quite the look of youth renewed that should be part of the lover’s gift to you.
Here comes the disagreeable bit. I have torn up your cheque to Papa. I want please a cheque for £44.
20 original cheque
6 journey to Paris
3 losses at cards
5 general pilfering
10 lent by Papa
—
£44
* * *
1 Lady of the House.
2 Ducks.
3 Cow.
4 The flower of the dead.
5 Day of the dead.
6 Flea market.
7 A small dressing table.
8 Harry S. Truman had just been elected Presiden
t of the United States, beating Thomas E. Dewey.
9 Daily Express journalist.
10 Topped off.
11 Given panache.
12 Badly brought up.
13 Famous nightclub chanteuse.
14 Collaborationist (with the Germans).
15 Lamb roasted on a spit.
16 The Prince of Wales was born on 14 November.
17 The shoot in Alsace.
18 London gunmakers.
19 Air Attaché at the Embassy.
20 Later, after an acrimonious divorce, to marry the distinguished historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, later Lord Dacre.
21 Helpless giggles.
22 Etienne Drian, portraitist and designer.
23 The Winter’s Tale.
24 My father was plagued by copies of Talleyrand in Dutch.
25 Of the Travellers’, presumably.
26 Browning again, ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’
27 Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth.
28 Of Hungary. The Communist government had put him on trial on 3 Feb., and he had pleaded guilty to all the crimes of which he was accused.
29 ‘It seems that there are some pretty little corners in Italy.’
30 Mary Teissier, married to the industrialist Lucien Teissier.
31 A mountain village to which my parents used to go to escape the heat of Algiers.
32 She was fifty-six.
33 ‘Where did you get that blacking for your fingernails, darling?’
34 Boris Kochno, Bébé’s partner, formerly secretary to Diaghilev.
35 Her French maid thought that a pullover, pronounced in the French way, meant a green ‘pullo’.
36 American Woolworth millionairess.
37 Can this be right? There was, I think, a ‘Prince Edward’ tobacco.
38 ‘Lightly pregnant.’
39 Child abuse.
40 Marshal Hubert Lyautey, first Resident-General in Morocco, father of French colonialism in North Africa.
41 ‘And there and then he raped me.’
42 ‘Often, when he’s making love and it’s time for prayer, he gets up, says his prayers, and then goes on with it.’
43 Rude words.
44 ‘So you do not speak Arabic, madame?’
45 ‘I prefer to wait for my host to place me.’
46 ‘Still, it’s lovely to see someone who has been really well brought up.’
47 One of the Tangier set.
48 Bat Touge, a friend of David.
49 Jane and Paul Bowles were distinguished American writers – he was also a successful composer – both basically homosexual, who spent much of their lives in Tangier.
50 Perhaps a quotation. My parents never lived in Spain.
51 Spanish, presumably.
52 Quotation from Frankie and Johnny.
53 Later to marry Sir Ian Gilmour MP.
54 Later to marry Sir John Smith MP, founder of the Landmark Trust.
55 My cousin Ursula Manners had been briefly married to him some years before.
12
‘I saw some cripples this morning, which makes me think I’m in the right place’
(CHANTILLY–PARIS–LONDON, APRIL–JULY 1949)
Invergordon
May 28th, 1949
Three evenings ago the officers were invited to a party given by Lady Ross, who lives only a mile or two away. The secretary describes her as American, fiftyish, still very attractive. She was apparently secretary to Lord Ross and married him on his deathbed, thereby becoming the third biggest landowner in the British Isles. All the officers got plastered (one was escorted upstairs less than an hour after arrival) and many didn’t stagger back till the next morning. Our dipsomaniac medical officer, who looks and talks like a dilapidated and debauched Noël Coward, has started a passionate romance with her, and gone off to Ross Castle (?) for the weekend without telling anyone. The Commander is furious . . .
Lots of love,
John Julius
IN THE EARLY summer of 1949, it seems that we were all, in our different ways, whooping it up. Not that – for the lower deck anyway – there’s much whooping to be done at Invergordon; but we had Denmark and Norway to look forward to, and both were to come fully up to expectations.
Meanwhile life in Paris – in marked contrast to that in London – had shaken off all traces of wartime austerity. It was as if the Parisians, all up and down the social scale, were determined to make up for the miseries that they had suffered during more than four years of Nazi occupation. There were no shortages, of food, clothes or anything else, while in England we were all still queuing up, ration books in hand. In Paris the season reached its climax with La Grande Semaine – the Great Week – in which every day, or every night, saw some fabulous festivity. For my mother, her family and friends, this culminated in the surprise ball that was given by her friends – not quite, as Nancy Mitford wrote to Pamela Berry, ‘by all Duff’s mistresses’ – in her honour. Her letter does not make it altogether clear whether she enjoyed it or not. I hope she did, but I doubt it. She mentions her blushes. People who ask me about her always find it hard to believe that she was plagued by shyness; even entering a roomful of strangers was a sore tax on her courage. The ball as she describes it must have been an agony to her.
Chantilly
April 24th, 1949
I’ve got too much to do here – my bones ache with hosing the new planted grass four hours a day. This morning thanks to God it rains and works for me. There are workmen in the house papering my new bedroom. They’ve been there ten days instead of the four I anticipated. They’ve irrevocably stained two carpets with shifting radiators and letting them trickle. They spoilt two last year too. The room is a shambles and they sit in the window embrasure sunbathing and munching and sipping while I push that mowing machine round with my stomach as my arms are too feeble. Only Noémi and I do any work at all and the poor little femme de ménage Georgette, who was supposed to come on hectic days. She has now to come all days and has been given all the animals to feed because Daniel a laissé crever une lapine1 and he’s always going to a wedding. Mireille visits the gynaecologist tomorrow – goody-goody.
We had a fairly boring lunch party, off cold fish drenched in garlic mayonnaise, and took the Sunday walk to the hameau2 where the deep-drinking gardien was sitting – a sodden Cerberus. Since the regretted death of M. Mallo3 the houses are irrevocably locked. They all went home but Nancy and at 6.30 Sir Noel and Lady Charles appeared en route for Ankara, their new post. He looked pimpant but his poor wife is a figure of fun in daylight. Her face is so crowded with dabs of misplaced colours – perhaps I should not throw stones from my glasshouse – she looks like an old good-sort actress and her producer has told her to be careful of her vowel sounds, but she doesn’t know how, so she puts three vowels for one: ‘biearnisters’ (sliding down the) was her best yesterday.
Barley came to dinner. Nancy told stories of early married life with Prod through shouts of laughter. It must have been nightmarish. They stayed once on the royal yacht of the Duc d’Aosta, correct and grand. Prod, plastered, came in at 6 a.m. and threw all the bottles of rare liqueurs from the cellaret in the ship’s saloon over the gunwale to witty worm friends4 on the quay.
Chantilly, April 27th, 1949
Very little to report. This morning I did a bit of hoeing but what I hoped would be an orderly patch with neat rows of Hungry Gap Kale is an Augean stable as big as a hamlet – thistles and nettles and roots of saplings and rocks. O dear, discouraged and frustrated again! Mireille visited a doctor yesterday to be reassured about her female organs. The report was excellent – clean bill – result a bad crise today – migraine, douleurs atroces and the rest of it. So instead of a Pernod we had lunch chez Madame de la Gare, watching the trains go out. Next I was fortunate enough to meet M. Blanchard, the tapissier – a rare chance as I was able to snatch from him the curtain material he has harboured untouched for six months. He was nice about it and said he quite understo
od. Life had become intolerable. No one learnt any trade, no apprenticeship – impossible to find workers – he’d become a fonctionnaire, working for the Government. Now I’m struggling to make the curtains myself.
The day before we went to Paris to the hospital to get Papa unstrapped. Most of his skin came off with the plaster. ‘It won’t take any more’, said the doc. So it’s just the bandage now and fewer clicking sounds (i.e. pain-saving groans).
The cow situation is acute. At a month overdue, I insisted on a vet listening for an accompanying heartbeat at the mother’s side. Yes, he heard it but vowed that the cow could not have been to the bull till late last July, although Jean and Mireille (now less sure) swore it was July 1st. Then Jean, although twice ordered by me not to send her to the farmer’s for her lying in, did so. Now to us a calf is born – today – and instead of having it to human view displayed among buttercups on the sloping meadow, it’s in a sort of maternity home.
You have just telephoned – a lovely surprise. You sounded alert and gay. The weekend is a teaser. Papa’s partners (he never knows what of) called Debroux came to lunch. The Walter Elliots are here, also came Prod and his sister and brother-in-law Golly and Simon Elwes. The Elliots I love in spite of such frightful ugliness, they’re like accidents and like accidents one has to look at them. I’d asked the Admiral Lacaze, the 85-year-old new Member of the Academy who has stepped into Germain Martin’s cold shoes. He refused but said he’d call in the afternoon. Four old, old gentlemen (one couldn’t have been real) arrived at 2.15 (pudding time). I had to leave the gay table and sit myself on the canapé bleu surrounded by a classical semi-circle of frock-coated caricatures. Coffee, liqueurs, smokes all refused. Shouts of merriment kept leaking out of the dining room. My wimples and sombreros, trousers and pearls, paint and bare heels were not the thing. Hardly had they gone than very worldly Alvilde turned up with English escort and talked mundanities with Christian names to the uninformed, so I took K. [Elliot] and Walter away to the farm and introduced Walter as Ministre de l’Agriculture and we wondered at the calf and then took a bit of a walk to look at the swan on her nest, and at 8.30 arrived the Millards (Ann in unusual beauty). Then a tall man called Fenwick, a horsy neighbour, then the dear Hervé Alphands.5 At 9.30 I could wait no longer for the final three – Mrs. Fenwick and Mr. and Mrs. (Czech) Walter Farr (Daily Mail) so dinner was all set. At 10.15 they arrived, straight from the hunt, three-corner-hatted, gold braid, muddy boots, very delightful, I thought. The dinner became hilariously gay, but Jean and Georges looked daggers and Mireille hasn’t been up this morning – sulking no doubt.
