Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  She looked most beautiful at parties, they said, but familiarity did not allow me to see her as so different, even dressed for the Court, from the person I saw when I slipped into her bed for my breakfast and she coaxed me with buttered English croissants. Her silk frilled nightdress was worn under a cream flannel kimono-shaped garment, and her beautiful head was bound, I cannot say how, seemingly in a knitted vest, the long sleeves of which wound round her chin and head in a mediaeval way. Podgie would say “Her bones can never grow old.” Nature she loved far less than art—carved alleys, statues in groves, stone seats everywhere, never moors or wild hills; rather symmetrical cypresses, classical lore, nothing windswept or primaeval.

  How can I hope to show her? I never saw her cross. Sulkiness was unknown to the whole family and quarrels too, after the childish days of “I’ll never speak to you again.” I have seen her anxious, impatient with trifles and exasperated with children, friends and servants if they concealed colds in their heads. She believed in the prophylactic powers of Dr Mackenzie’s Black Smelling Bottle and a carbolic throat-spray, and in saucers dotted over the house holding old scraps of blotting-paper mirror-written, saturated in eucalyptus oil, and in the agonised swallowing of twenty drops of spirits of camphor on a lump of sugar. Naturally we hid our colds until they overflowed, dreading these consequences, and so the circle became vicious.

  She had no respect for time or time-tables, regularity of bedtime or for going out or lessons—she thought them all unnecessary. The children must lie flat to keep their backs straight and hold themselves and their heads up. Holly pinned to one’s frock beneath one’s chin was threatened but not used. She had no sympathy with punishment or with any teaching but history, poetry, the piano and art.

  Our schoolroom walls, papered in William Morris’s olive leaves, were half-covered with photographs framed in arty green wood of Italian Masters—not familiar Raphaels but Crivellis, Mantegnas, Fra Lippo Lippis, Primitives, Botticellis and details of Botticellis, such as Primavera’s flower-scattered dress and the Graces’ pearl-threaded plaits, or the round-cheeked Wind blowing Venus to the shore and fluttering her daisy-strewn cloak. There were also macabre death-masks of Napoleon, Beethoven and L’Inconnue de la Seine, and casts of the hands and feet of Pauline Borghese and Lady Shrewsbury.

  We pored over The Hundred Best Pictures, a curious collection of Millais, Lord Leighton, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones and Turner, and became picture-perfect in those schools. My mother had been painted by Watts and had sat to Millais for the nun in St Bartholomew’s Day. Many of the figures in the Burne-Jones pictures were portraits of our friends the Homers. It made us feel proud and part of it all. I was taken to see Watts, a memorable old figure in a white smock and black skull-cap. In his studio was a naked man on a horse, snow-white and too big for perspective. It must have been the cast of Physical Energy. I was often the artist’s model. The first picture by J. J. Shannon, when I was two, I do not remember sitting for; but another painting, when I was eight, I well remember, and the huge studio in Holland Park, Shannon himself, whom everyone loved, darting backwards and forwards with palette and mahlstick, delicious smells of paint and turps, a mirror behind the painter in which I could watch the picture grow, while my mother’s gentle voice read aloud stories of musicians. She was a more exacting pose-master; besides, when the drawing was finished a new one was begun at once, and there was a not very successful bust of me as Joan of Arc that lingered on and on unfinished. We had to be statue-still while my mother, with her Waterman’s block held firm by a cushion on her lap, peered up at her model and down at her hard 3H pencil for hours at a time.

  I can see very distinctly a typical morning in the white-panelled drawing-room at The Woodhouse, Rowsley, an old manor house on a Derbyshire hill not a stone’s throw from Haddon Hall, where I yearly spent three summer months, after babyhood on the beach. If I was the model, my mother and Marjorie and Letty would all be drawing me perched on a cushion on a hard oak settle, while Podgie would be reading aloud a book a bit above my head, generally historical. The even voice would be broken into by my mother saying “Right ear a little down” or “Nose towards the window.” At twelve there was a break, curiously enough, for port and biscuits brought by a liveried footman on a silver tray. Then perhaps Marjorie would open the piano and play and practise some songs by Liza Lehmann or Gounod or from the new Puccini opera. Viola Tree, so often there, would sing too, and their clear young voices would merge in a duet and transport me. A short run among roses, and dahlias on stakes with a flower-pot on top to snare the earwigs and other pests, jumping to loosen my statued limbs, I crunched the diamond quartz gravel peculiar to the Woodhouse garden, and doubled back to a lunch of trout and grouse and garden peas and pudding. Meals were very gay. Viola and Marjorie, I had come to realise, were excruciatingly funny, imitating friends and stage people, inventing characters and acting them. I would have to run out of the room with my mouth full to avoid choking with laughter. Idleness was a crime—sew, knit, draw or read, but “Don’t do nothing.”

  The few letters I find of those days written to my father are wonderfully illiterate, generally sympathising with him over his health (he was an extremely healthy man) and overflowing with protestations of love, and always “We are so so happy—you’ve no idea how happy we are.”

  So these happy years passed, but anxieties grew. If my mother was late or not to be found I would imagine her dead, murdered even. Motors had accidents and I could hardly bear Letty to be in one without me lest it killed her. My prayers became like an insurance policy. “Please God, don’t let there be a famine or a drought (I had seen pictures of starving Indians and Chinese), or train or motor or carriage accidents. Don’t let any of us be ill or have operations. Don’t let the house burn, and don’t let Father or Mother die before I do, and let me live until I’m eighty or ninety.” I always felt that I did not know how to pray, but I persevered. For years I prayed that Bim-bash Stuart, a man I hardly knew but one who had died in our street, might be in Heaven. I was in love with him for dying.

  My next love was for Fridtjof Nansen. He was a Norwegian giant who called me “Viking,” and I loved him obsessedly. At eleven years old I read the two-volume work on his expedition to the Pole. Only true love could have carried me through the unintelligible scientific data. I think I must have been a snob in those days. All my loves were celebrities and generally very old ones. I must have been flirtatious too. I wanted passionately to be loved. When Letty reported that someone had said I was pretty or amusing or clever for my age, I would make her repeat it a hundred times while my face glowed with pleasure. After the old gentlemen, it was Marjorie’s admirers that I gave my heart to. They took pains with the young sisters and sent us presents and feigned an interest in us. I would get up at dawn and comb my hair becomingly and meet them at the door to wave them goodbye and beg them to return. I hoped that they would realise my feelings for them. Our cousin Ruby Lindsay practically lived with us in those days. She also did not lack for swains, being very beautiful and spirited, and her admirers too I loved to distraction.

  I was growing tall and rather fat, very dissatisfied with my appearance and myself. I felt that I wasn’t clever, which I so longed to be. I felt that people over-estimated me and that I should be found out and cause disillusion. It haunted me and yet I could not help showing off, a surface glitter, wanting and trying to shine through thick miasmas of shyness. I saw no one of my own age except the two younger Tree children, and another little girl with long wavy hair and smart dresses, called Irene Lawley. She had come from India, where her father was a Governor, and had been, according to Nanny, “spoilt by the ayah.” She came often to tea, and Letty and I yearly stayed with her in Yorkshire, where together we wrote a thriller about the French Revolution. She still lives in Yorkshire and I love her as I loved her then. Whatever house we were in was packed with friends of my grown-up sisters and Viola, or notables of my mother’s generation. Looking back I wonder how such men as Lord C
urzon, Alfred Lyttelton or Arthur Balfour could have endured a night at The Woodhouse. True, it broke their journey to or from Scotland in the summer, and this fact must account for their facing more than once a small damp house loud with children, with one bathroom, generally locked and blacked out because of its use as a developing room. When they did get in, it would smell of the hot red oil-light or of developer and hypo, and into the bath dripped negatives pinned to a festooned tape. There would be four candles to a room (no electric light), plenty of servants, deafening practising of scales from 8 a.m., and snap patience after dinner. No one played real cards except my father, who therefore never got a game. When I was fourteen, a turning date for me, everything changed. Another bathroom was added, electric light was installed and one could better understand these notables coming to a house and family that had something unlike other establishments.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Brave New World

  MY fourteenth year changed everything. My grandfather died of old age. My father succeeded him. There was more money but no less talk of ruin. Income tax had reached elevenpence. Every successive penny rise plunged us again into fear of the workhouse. Letty “came out.” Her long hair went up. I was alone at home, so allowed to stay away. That year the Tree family had a house at Brancaster and I went to stay with my dearest friends for perhaps three weeks. The Dormy House in the village and also another hired house were filled with Oxford boys on a reading party. There I met on equal terms (I was tall, precocious and on my own) people who were to be my friends until their death—too soon it came—Charles Lister, Alan Parsons, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Edward Horner, Bunt Goschen and many others. Never was I so happy.

  There were also Lady Ribblesdale and her two Lister daughters, now Laura Lovat and Diana Westmorland. No one could hold a candle to Laura. A little older in years, much our elder in experience and ways of the world, she was someone to emulate. I bought secretly a bottle of peroxide. I had heard that it made hair golder. I experimented and denied the experiment, declaring that the sun had bleached my hair. Our days were spent in bathing and crabbing and picnicking and practising the piano and butterflying and sleeping out on the “Enchanted Island,” and for me in exulting over this brave new world. The evenings were always musical. A German governess in the house was a fair pianist and Viola and Marjorie would sing. Tennyson’s Maud set to music by Arthur Somervell was sung through pretty well every evening. I knew that the young men saw Maud like Laura and not like me.

  Maud is not seventeen,

  But she is tall and stately.

  I was not tall enough. I was curiously ignorant and innocent compared with today’s fourteen-year-olds, but now all knowledge and all anticipation and the excitement of being myself a part of romance and adventure, and not only hearing and reading about it, intoxicated me. I was showing off madly with my new gold hair and knowing about Browning and Meredith and lots of erudition that other children had not got, and concealing the nine-tenths of the iceberg of total ignorance. Iris Tree, four years younger, told me many unbelievable facts. I cannot think that I should have liked myself, but I must have had something appealing and enthusiastic and affectionate.

  I was in love with Alan Parsons, naturally, because he loved Viola Tree and later married her, but some others I really thought loved me and promised to write and to find me again wherever I went. So I returned home grown up, with friends of my own, to find the old world as I had left it—my mother remaking Belvoir and my father “pottering” on the terraces, Letty and Marjorie hunting and going to winter shooting-parties and hunt balls, both of them and my cousin Ruby occupied with suitors and philanderers. I hugged my secrets and had no envy whatever of their boring parties and eligible eldest sons. I had my own intellectuals and I would lie in secret wait for the postman, and then, with my letters, lock myself into that small closet which can temporarily be one’s own, and read and re-read the little protestations I was hungry for.

  Each year now enriched me. The original few at Brancaster became part of all our lives. Edward Horner was a son of great family friends. His sister Cicely was a close companion of Marjorie’s, and another sister, Katharine, became my dearest friend. She married Raymond Asquith, who, though older, was part of that haloed band who were to die in the war and leave us, our generation and England, woebegone and maimed—Julian and Billy Grenfell, George Vernon, Edward Horner, John Manners, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Ego and Ivo Charteris, and many many others.

  *

  Greek—everything must be Greek. I must draw a bow and have a crescent in my hair, draperies, sandalled or bare feet (dragging at the second toe to make it longer than the big one), peplums, archaic smiles, shining white limbs of the godlike youths in the river, Pan pipes, Butcher and Lang’s Homer readings, and human statues photographed on pedestals. There is a bust that Mackennal made of me with Grecian curls and a crescent and the rest of it.

  Fashion had come round to us. Gone were the buttoned boots, the curves, the boned collars, the straight-fronted stays, the hennaed hair and hair-nets. We subscribed to a fashion paper called L’Art et la Mode, with drawings by a then little-known artist called Drian. It was everything my mother had always stood for—“le vague” and lines of the body slinkily followed into the feet, loosely knotted hair, willowy and dependent, not armed for merciless conquest. I became an inspired dressmaker. A “fit” was no longer necessary. I suppose I made a guy of myself, and soon worse was to come. Henry Bernstein came to Belvoir. He was, I suppose, young and very noble-looking. He smothered my mother in red roses, which we thought was a French custom. With him came Princess Murat, a fascinating surprise and totally different from anything we knew. She brought to us, Gentiles where fashion was concerned, the glad tidings of the rising star Poiret, an eccentricity, a new word and a new mania. She herself wore the first of those tanagra-esque garments, later sold by thousands (many to me over twenty years), made by Fortuni of Venice—timeless dresses of pure thin silk cut severely straight from shoulder to toe, and kept wrung like a skein of wool. In every crude and subtle colour, they clung like mermaid’s scales. I think she must have had in her luggage a Poiret invention. It was a chiffon shirt worn in the evening over a skirt. It was cut like an Eastern djibbah and edged at hem and Eastern neckline with braid. I elaborated the design, even to putting fur instead of braid, and made them by the dozen for friends and friends’ friends. They cost me about fifteen shillings and I charged two guineas. I made over a hundred pounds, all of which I spent on books—éditions de luxe and first editions, the Edinburgh Stevenson, Meredith, Wilde, Conrad and Maupassant. I owed a lot to Poiret and made him ridiculous, no doubt, by my base imitations.

  When I was fifteen came our first trip abroad. My mother took us three girls, Ruby Lindsay and white-haired Louise Piers to Florence. My father, unsympathetic to travel, gave her a hundred pounds to cover tickets and all expenses. The Villa Palmieri in Fiesole had been lent to my mother by her cousin Lady Crawford, so the fortune stitched into her stays would not have to pay a Florentine hotel. Our luggage and paraphernalia were prodigious. Little was trusted abroad, so everything must be taken from home—a pharmacopoeia, a clinical thermometer (French ones being unusable) with spares in case of breakage, umbrellas rolled in rugs, sunshades of natural-coloured cotton lined with dark blue or green. We were armed with a laissez-passer by favour of the French Ambassador, Monsieur Cambon, so that no luggage should be searched. It did not stop a desperate struggle at Dover, and at Calais a free fight. Guards and porters from London to Dover were questioned about the state of the sea. My mother took an opium pill but I, on a steamer for the first time, was determined to feel like a figurehead. While the train dragged round its ceinture de Paris we piled into a fiacre to see in eighty minutes the main monuments. I had never before seen a meter on a cab, and watching its changes interfered with my sight-seeing. At the Gare de Lyon we hired a tartan rug and a pillow apiece (wagons-lit were not dreamed of) and sat well-tucked through the long night in the lurid light o
f a blue bulblet. I saw the Alps through the chink of smoke-caked blinds. Clouds below the peaks were unhoped-for. Daylight came and the remains of our station dinner were brought out for breakfast—rolls not eaten the night before, stuffed with fragments of meat and salad and cheese and butter. These with bowls of steaming coffee bought at a stop in Switzerland made a good change from porridge and eggs and milk (milk was not safe abroad, or water either).

  We followed Baedeker from left to right of the train windows. The opening sentence rings still: “Over all the movements of the traveller the weather exercises its despotic sway.” Baedeker’s warnings of what not to eat were well digested and his suggestions for clothing disregarded. The third-best hotel was chosen on principle, which meant two to a room and fairly dirty. We stopped at Genoa to be taught about Vandyck and for me to discover the beauties of clothes-lines slung across the narrow mountain-built streets, and at Pisa to dread the tower falling upon us.

  At Fiesole the Villa Palmieri was interiorly disappointing. I had expected a Capulet sala as designed for His Majesty’s Theatre. Instead it was stuffy plush with a bust of Queen Victoria, but the garden had Juliet’s balcony overlooking all I expected of Italy—little pointed hills, cypresses, lemons in flower, oranges to pick. We were always hungry in Florence. There were days of gruelling sight-seeing, churches and pictures, with a spaghetti lunch at Le Sport for 1.50 lire a head, chianti included, which went a little to Marjorie’s and Ruby’s heads, and led them to make eyes at the uniformed officers at other tables. At least my mother attributed it to the wine. There would be no tea, but a lot of buying at antique shops. My mother, though limited to her hundred pounds, seemed to have carte blanche with the Belvoir Clerk of the Works, so she bought unstintingly big Bolognese cupboards and tables, gilded frames and Forum-sized marble pillars for her Italian garden at Belvoir. They were sent petite vitesse and arrived months later. Estate expenses are not gone into. My money, collected for months, went on church candlesticks (cheap because the gilt had come off, which I could later home-gild myself with gesso, size, gold leaf and a burnisher), tassels and braids, anything to make my new room at Belvoir more like Carpaccio’s idea of St Ursula’s.