Darling Monster

by Diana Cooper

  30 Appetite of a bird.

  31 Caretakers at Opio.

  32 The Navy’s most recent and fastest battleship, flagship of the Mediterranean.

  33 Admiral Sir Philip Vian, First Sea Lord and Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean.

  34 Where my father had fallen so ill in 1947.

  35 Daisy’s yacht.

  36 Literally The Lovely Lady Gardener, a picture by Raphael of the Virgin, Child and St John, now in the Louvre.

  37 In full evening dress.

  38 Sir Charles Mendl, well into his nineties.

  39 A nightclub.

  40 Gay – but nonetheless scandalising – escort of the Duchess of Windsor.

  41 Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two members of the British Foreign Service, had just fled to Moscow.

  42 The father of plastic surgery.

  43 Sir Robert Helpmann, ballet dancer and choreographer.

  44 ‘And also his wife.’

  45 ‘He’s just cleaned up my bosom. I breast-fed my baby and my bosom had a bad time. Would you like me to show it to you?’

  46 Old country slang for ‘hare’.

  47 Keats, ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’.

  48 In small sips.

  49 Later it was always known as ‘the coat of shame’.

  50 A photograph by Cecil Beaton in her costume for the Bestegui Ball in Venice.

  51 The death of King George VI on 6 February.

  52 Paul-Louis (joke).

  53 My mother and I had accompanied him on a memorable tour of the French front in January 1945.

  54 Patrick Leigh Fermor had just written The Traveller’s Tree, a study of the Caribbean.

  55 Where are the snows of yesteryear?

  56 Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland.

  57 Paul Gallico wrote five books about pussycats. I don’t know which this was.

  58 Starting.

  59 From the south.

  60 Knocked about.

  61 ‘I gather you’re going to set up in a restaurant?’

  ‘Where did Milady hear such a story?’

  ‘Oh, everywhere, Jean, in the town and in the country.’

  62 The Man in the Moon came down too soon, and asked his way to Norwich;

  They sent him south, and he burnt his mouth by eating cold pease-porridge. (Old nursery rhyme.)

  63 From Lady Diana Cooper – she bore the title in her own right, the inclusion of the Christian name denoting a duke’s, marquess’s or earl’s daughter – to Lady Norwich, simple Lord Norwich’s wife.

  64 Louise’s second husband.

  65 Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

  Epilogue

  This is not the end of the letters, but it marks a milestone. My Oxford days were over, and in the autumn of 1952, a newly married man, I began my life as a member of the Foreign Service that was to continue for the next dozen years. For the first three of these I was stationed in London, going backwards and forwards to Chantilly whenever possible and speaking to my mother most days on the telephone. The letters consequently almost dry up; it was only when I was posted to Belgrade in January 1955 that they once again come thick and fast.

  As I read them now, for the first time in well over half a century, how do they strike me? To begin with, they come from a different world, a world in which the presence of servants was a matter of course – and by no means only in families of the relatively rich and privileged. The perfectly ordinary middle-class family with whom I lived in Strasbourg, for example, a couple in their early thirties with two children, employed a staff of three – a cook and two maids – and still brought in caterers when they gave a dinner party. At Chantilly my parents must have employed six or seven at least; and, as the letters make all too clear, they frequently seem to have been a good deal more trouble than they were worth. Not that my mother was a difficult employer: Miss Wade, who plays a considerable part in the early letters, remained devotedly with her for over fifty years and was lovingly looked after for the rest of her life – though she proved, alas, untransportable to France.

  To a large extent, of course, servants were indispensable. Vacuum cleaners, though still of a fairly elementary kind, were already in common use; but our primitive refrigerator at Bognor was operated by gas, while dishwashers, blenders, microwaves, deep freezes and the thousand other devices which we now take for granted – suitcases on wheels also come to mind – were still non-existent, as were supermarkets with their copious stocks of precooked dishes. This, perhaps, still fails to explain why my father, his friends and contemporaries needed personal manservants for every day of their lives, valets who would automatically accompany them whenever they went away for the weekend and whom their hosts would expect to accommodate. Standards of dress were admittedly far more demanding than they are today; certainly until the Second World War, my father would expect to wear white tie and tails three or four times a week, and always when going to the theatre. After the war, white ties became a lot less frequent; but he still changed into a dinner jacket almost every night of his life,1 and at Chantilly – which was, let me emphasise, considered pretty informal as such houses go – we never sat down to lunch or dinner without the butler, Jean, standing in the corner supervising the service.

  Then there is the matter of transport. After the war the age of civil aviation gradually resumed, but at least until the middle 1950s aeroplanes remained unreliable. It was not that they tended to fall out of the sky; already they were probably safer than cars or even trains. But they were irregular and unpunctual, hideously so during the winter. When my father came to London in December 1944 to pick me up and take me back to Paris, RAF Transport Command made us wait four days in London before the weather permitted a cross-Channel trip; we arrived only on Christmas Eve.

  There was one other enormous difference to our way of life sixty – nearly seventy – years ago. No television. I wonder whether my father ever in his life watched that tiny, flickering, black and white screen – not that it had much to offer in those days. Certainly we never had it at Chantilly. At weekends when people came to stay, there might be a rubber or two of bridge, which he loved; otherwise we just talked, or occasionally sang to my guitar or around the piano. On all other evenings we read aloud, usually Dickens or Trollope, but sometimes short stories – by Kipling, perhaps, or Somerset Maugham, or – for me best of all – P. G. Wodehouse.

  Mention of my father raises another question. To those who never knew him – and by now there are relatively few who did – I wonder how he emerges from these letters. Self-indulgent certainly: he loved all the good things of life and made sure that he got them whenever possible. ‘It’s always cheaper in the long run’, he used to maintain, ‘to stay at the Ritz’ – though in fact he personally preferred the Dorchester. He was, on the other hand, anything but soft or effete. His physical bravery he had shown by winning the Distinguished Service Order in the First World War; his moral courage by his resignation from Neville Chamberlain’s Cabinet after the Munich agreement of 1938. He was astonishingly well read in history and literature; his biography of Talleyrand has been consistently in print for the past eighty years. He also had a passion for poetry, which he could recite for hours at a time; Shakespeare he knew virtually by heart; he even wrote a short, light-hearted book about him. Thanks largely to a superb sense of humour, he was wonderful company – though if he was bored, he was incapable of concealing it.

  None of this, of course, comes out in these letters. Why should it? I knew him already. The picture painted here strikes me as slightly mocking; but the mockery, such as it is, is clearly a sign of affection. This is made clearer still by the genuine anguish that my mother felt whenever he showed the slightest signs of sickness. He was, as we know, seriously ill in April 1947 and, as I have already said, I believe he never quite recovered. By the 1950s he was on a strict diet, which after a few early lapses he conscientiously followed; but it was too late. On New Year’s Day 1954 he died of a sudden violent haemorrhage – at sea, on his way with
my mother to a Caribbean holiday.

  It took her a long time to recover from his death. She had had one or two light-hearted affairs, but he was the only man she had really loved. He, on the other hand, had had a great many throughout their married life; but she never minded except when she believed that the lady concerned was unworthy of him. ‘Mind?’ she once said to me. ‘Why should I mind if they made him happy? I always knew: they were the flowers, I was the tree.’

  Thanks to the support of friends and family, she gradually regained the will to live. Henceforth, inevitably, her entire life centred on me and my family. She hung on for another six years at Chantilly, on the grounds that the Foreign Office might post me to Paris. Over and over again I tried to explain that this would not and could not happen; that, if it did, life for my chief the ambassador – and still more for his wife – would be impossible; as the letters make all too clear, she had made things difficult enough for the Harveys. Of course she refused to listen, of course she pulled all the strings she could, but – thank heavens – to no avail. When, in January 1955, I was posted to Belgrade and my wife Anne and I lived for the first six months in one tiny hotel room, she took care of our two-year-old daughter Artemis at Chantilly, giving her daily lessons as she had given me; later she came to visit us, once to Belgrade, two or even three times to Beirut.

  Finally, in 1960, I returned to London, with every prospect of remaining there for the next four or five years; and she gave up. The Château de Saint-Firmin was returned to the Institut de France, and she rented a house a few hundred yards from ours in Little Venice, where she was to live for over a quarter of a century. By this time my son Jason had been born; she took over his education too. No grandmother, I feel sure, ever got more fun out of her grandchildren; they adored her in return.

  Despite everything we could do, her last three or four years were, I’m afraid, unhappy. Her great joy had been driving her little Mini around London; while she was mobile she was content; she could go shopping, take friends on errands or her grandchildren to the cinema. She would leave notes for parking wardens tucked under the windscreen wiper: one, I remember, read ‘Dearest warden, have gone to dentist 19a. Look like 85-year-old pirate. Have mercy.’ We were all surprised by how often they worked. Then, one day when she was eighty-nine, she hit a traffic island in Wigmore Street. She drove straight home, locked the car, went up to bed and never drove again. ‘I never saw it,’ she told me later, ‘it might have been a child.’

  She never left her bed again; there was no point. She had, thank God, no dementia; but failing eyesight gradually made it impossible to read, and increasing deafness to enjoy the television. ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like’, she said to me once, ‘just staring at the same bit of wallpaper – and with nothing to look forward to.’ I would call in every evening on my way back from the London Library, hoping that there would be no other visitor; three-way conversations were beyond her.

  She died – quite simply of old age – on 18 June 1986, a few weeks before her ninety-fourth birthday.

  * * *

  1 At Belvoir Castle my uncle, the Duke of Rutland, who died during the war, was known to insist on white tie for dinner every night. When he was once asked if he never wore a black one, he replied, ‘Only when I am dining with the Duchess alone in her room.’

  Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire, Diana’s childhood home

  Duff and Diana at their wedding, 2 June 1919

  The Miracle – the Virgin comes to life, New York, 1924

  Winston Churchill and Duff, Ditchley, 1940

  Minister of Information, 1940

  Pam Berry and Diana, c. 1938

  Rex Whistler, c. 1943

  Conrad Russell, in Home Guard uniform, 1940

  Raimund von Hofmannsthal, c. 1936

  John Julius sitting on his trunk, New York, July 1940

  John Julius in New York, 1940

  Kaetchen, c.1941

  Kaetchen, John Julius and Nanny Ayto, New York, 1940

  John Julius at Upper Canada College Preparatory School, 1941

  Kiluna Farm, August 1941 (Duff and Diana on their way to Singapore)

  Lunch at Bognor, c. 1937 (watercolour by Rex Whistler)

  The bees at Bognor, 1942

  Diana and Princess, 1941

  Wadey and her hens, c. 1942

  Diana making cheese, 1942

  Bognor after lunch, 1943

  Reading aloud at Bognor, c. 1942

  John Julius on his way to Eton, September 1942

  Duff and Liz Paget at Bognor, c.1936

  Maurice Baring and Dempsey, c. 1940

  Duff in his new library at the British Embassy, 1947

  Diana on the Embassy staircase

  Diana on Pauline Borghese’s bed, the Embassy, 1945

  Diana and Paul-Louis Weiller (centre) with Gerald van der Kemp (curator of Versailles, extreme left) and Serge Ligan (dancer, second from right), c. 1947

  After dinner at the Embassy, 1946. Léon Blum, Vincent Auriol, Winston Churchill and Georges Bidault

  Children’s tea party, the Embassy, c. 1945

  Château de Saint-Firmin, Chantilly

  The drawing room (with Bijou) at Chantilly

  Louise de Vilmorin and Duff at Chantilly, c. 1950

  Louise de Vilmorin

  Evelyn Waugh at Chantilly, c. 1955

  Diana and Paddy Leigh Fermor, Delos, 1955

  San Viglio

  Duff at San Viglio

  John Julius (left) H.M.S. Royal Arthur, Corsham, Wilts, January, 1948

  Diana and John Julius, London, c.1944

  John Julius and Diana, Chantilly, c.1949

  Duff with Willow, c. 1953

  John Julius looks back on his childhood

  Duff and Diana at John Julius’s wedding, Sutton Place, Guildford, 5 August 1952

  Directory of Names

  Albert Lord Ashfield. Head of London Transport and in love with my mother.

  Alex Alexander Clifford, journalist. Married to Jenny Nicholson (q.v.), also journalist, daughter of Robert Graves.

  Ali Alistair Forbes, journalist.

  Altrincham Lord and Lady (Ned and Joan), fellow-directors of the Wagons-Lits Company.

  Alvilde Married 1) Anthony Chaplin, 2) James Lees-Milne.

  André (Bonnot) Huissier, white-tied door-opener at the Embassy.

  Angleseys Charles Paget, Marquess of Anglesey, married my mother’s eldest sister Marjorie. Their children were Caroline (m. Sir Michael Duff), Liz (m. Raimund von Hofmannsthal), Rose (m. John McLaren), Mary, Katherine (Kitty, m. Charles Farrell) and Henry (present Marquess, m. Shirley Morgan).

  Ann, Annie Ann O’Neill, married 1) Lord Rothermere and 2) Ian Fleming.

  Annabel Jones Daughter of Pandora and Timothy Jones, later to found Jones, the jewellers. Married William Astor, mother of Mrs David Cameron.

  Anne Anne Clifford, whom I was to marry in 1952.

  Ashfield, Lord See Albert.

  Ashley Ashley Clarke, Minister in Paris under my father and later Amassador in Rome. Married at that time to Virginia, later Surtees.

  Asquith, Katherine See Katherine.

  Auberon Auberon Herbert, a Roman Catholic eccentric, had been rejected by the British Army at the outbreak of war and had instantly joined the Polish one.

  Ava Lady Anderson, later Waverley. Her husband, formerly Sir John Anderson, had been Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary.

  Barbara Barbara Hutchinson, daughter of St John and Mary Hutchinson, married 1) Victor Rothschild, 2) Rex Warner, 3) Niko Ghika.

  Barbie Barbie Wallace, married to Euan (q.v.).

  Baring, Maurice See Maurice.

  Barley Barley Alison, on the Embassy staff, later a London publisher.

  Beaton, Cecil See Cecil.

  Beaverbrook, Lord, Max Proprietor of the Daily Express. My godfather.

  Bébé Christian Bérard, illustrator and designer.

  Bedbug Baroness Moura Budberg. See Moura.

  Belvoir Be
lvoir Castle, Leicestershire, ancestral home of the Rutland family.

  Bendern, John de My father’s one-time secretary in Paris.

  Benson, Jeremy See Jeremy.

  Bernstein, Henri French playwright.

  Berry, Pam See Pam.

  Bertram Bertram Cruger, an American Anglophile friend of my mother.

  Bestegui Charlie de Bestegui, Mexican multimillionaire and connoisseur.

  Betty Married to Robert (Bobbety), Lord Cranborne, later Marquess of Salisbury, (q.v.).

  Bill William S. Paley, President of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in whose house on Long Island I spent all my holidays during my wartime evacuation.

  Bloggs Wyndham Baldwin, son of the former Prime Minister. I think he and my mother had a gentle love affair, 1944–5.

  Bobbety Lord Cranborne, later Marquess of Salisbury. Married to Betty (q.v.).