Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  Bushey

  I have been sitting under a wall reading all the letters you have written me since I came here. I found them entrancing and I feel they would bear the test of the typewriter better than mine. Some day I will type them with my own hands lovingly and you shall read them again and mount in your self-esteem.

  They are in my hands today, only the self-esteem has not mounted.

  So Duff passed his examination and came back to London and soldiered at Chelsea Barracks, and six firelit winter months were before us, two of them to bring unbearable sadness. Edward was killed in November while defending a village near Cambrai. It was overwhelmingly dreadful. His mother and his sister had had enough to bear. Katharine broke it to me. Together we told Lady Horner. My mother was sympathetic. She, like everyone else, had found Edward irresistible. He had a lot of real melancholy woven into his joie de vivre. He could not bear to be humdrum. He thought life could do more than it can, and it had not given him much except a loving family and friends. Duff, though battered by the blow, was invincible in spirit, while I felt like pulling the clothes over my coward’s head.

  To make the sadness more poignant and the situation more macabre, Patrick Shaw-Stewart was on his way to London from Salonika for what was to be his last leave. He had not heard of Edward’s death. Venetia told him on the telephone. The festivities arranged for him were muffled, however much we tried to make them glitter. His leave was, alas, unspontaneous and sad. The thought of return weighed heavily upon him. Those of us who were left felt we must inevitably be crushed on a stupid pitiless wheel.

  Duff wrote in his diary: “So ends 1917 which has been, I think, the least happy year that I have lived.” As he wrote, he did not know that Patrick had been killed in France the day before. A bullet in his head brought him instantaneous death—and an end to his brave heart and his mind teeming with methodical designs for a life of fine aims, fortune, fulfilment. His memory will last as long as we who knew him live to remember, and perhaps a little longer, for his classic mood and courage live in a poem scribbled on a leaf of A Shropshire Lad that was always with him:

  I saw a man this morning

  Who did not wish to die:

  I asked, and cannot answer,

  If otherwise wish I.

  Fair broke the day this morning

  Against the Dardanelles;

  The breeze blew soft, the morn’s cheeks

  Were cold as cold sea-shells.

  But other shells are waiting

  Across the Ægean sea,

  Shrapnel and high explosive,

  Shells and hells for me.

  O hell of ships and cities,

  Hell of men like me,

  Fatal second Helen,

  Why must I follow thee?

  Achilles came to Troyland

  And I to Chersonese:

  He turned from wrath to battle,

  And I from three days’ peace.

  Was it so hard, Achilles,

  So very hard to die?

  Thou knowest and I know not—

  So much the happier I.

  I will go back this morning

  From Imbros over the sea;

  Stand in the trench, Achilles,

  Flame-capped, and shout for me.

  As the weeks galloped along towards the spring offensive, the more listless and crippled my inner self became. The hospital routine did not avail, nor did new friends. Alan, my sentinel, was in the far Indies and sadly missed. There was only Duff now for consolation—Duff my most loved and most feared for.

  The dreaded day of his departure fell in April. His mother, the most selfless of women, whose love for Duff was her whole life, would not be there to see him go but rather chose to say goodbye in the hall of some hotel and to walk away without looking back. She knew of our deep attachment and gave it all the blessings she had to give. Duff, more resilient, was excited at his prospects. He wrote in Old Men Forget:

  So I enjoyed those warm April days in London. My duties grew lighter and finally ceased altogether. I had more time to spend with my friends…. The last night was the best of all.

  It was my very worst. We dined with a friend, Harold Baker. Venetia was there and Duff’s sister Sybil, Michael Herbert and Hugo Rumbold. But let Duff tell of it:

  The atmosphere was a little strained at first, but under the influence of wine it all went well enough, I thought. We sat long at the table. Mother telephoned to say good-bye. We walked over to Venetia’s, where we had a final bottle. I found that I had left my coat behind. Sybil volunteered to go and get it in a taxi. She returned with the wrong one. Diana and I then went for it and this made me late, so that our last drive together was marred by my worrying about the time. She dropped me at Chelsea. It was very dark on the square. The draft was already formed up. The Adjutant was there and only laughed at my being late. The officer in charge of the draft had arrived, but was in no state to march to Waterloo, and so had gone away again and was coming on by taxi. Teddie [the Adjutant] thought that I should probably be in the same state but I explained to him that I wasn’t. As I was senior to the two other officers, I took charge and marched off the men, leading them, with the drums in front. The band played nearly all the way from Chelsea to Waterloo and I felt proud, romantic and exalted. There were a lot of people at the station, the Baroness [d’Erlanger], Hugo, Ivo, Gerard Brassey, Sybil, Venetia and Diana. Diana had changed her clothes or wrapped something round, I didn’t notice which, but she appeared to be all in black, and her face so white, so white. We had some time to wait at the station though it seemed too short, and she and I found a dark deserted waiting-room where we exchanged our last embraces…. At last we left. The band struck up again as the train moved out of the station.

  I went home and wrote to him:

  Arlington Street

  2 a.m.

  I think of all my extravagant dreams and demands that you have fulfilled. I adored your glorious spirits. Your salute to the Colonel deserves a page of praise. I am terrified that I clung and clamoured too much—a bright trite mask might have helped you more. It seemed unnecessary with you—you needed no courage…. So pleased I was that M. was too drunk to lead a dog to the water, so that you marched the men to Waterloo. Pray God I have word of you soon. Good-night.

  In France Duff wrote in his diary: “I wrote to Diana and tried to say how much I love her, but failed, failed.” So little did he fail that re-reading those dear letters from France, I see it was in this battle-time that marriage became the true goal of our days. I thought, if death will only spare him we will live our lives together.

  Arlington Street

  Midnight

  At all moments I ask myself what you are doing, always hoping you are warm and asleep and dreading most your loneliness. If only the others were with you—it’s all easy then. If only I were with you like Serbian and Russian couples we see illustrated. Never think of me lonely. They are all so good—Venetia etc.—and do their best. Letty terribly concerned if I cry at night.

  * Miss Teddie Gerard, most popular music-hall artist of the day.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Glory and the Dream

  TO continue the same life of the Rutland Hospital and move among ghosts and desolation was unfaceable, and I determined to return for a month to the austerity of Guy’s. I knew it would hurt my mother deeply, but I would perhaps have hurt her more with tears and sulks and love-sickness at home. My sad sister Letty was living and nursing at the Rutland Hospital.

  Arlington Street*

  April 30

  It all went off far worse than I feared. When Her Grace came in I started bravely enough with “Now darling, about Guy’s,” then God! hands up, shrieks, gasps for restoratives, so I withdrew into my own pleasant sheets’ warmth and sent Letty to calm her, and they wrangled, poor souls, till three a.m…. I long to know how much she connects this intolerance, this great remonstrance, with love or sorrow for you. Now this morning the continuance of scenes and ravings makes me waver,
and again if I waver now I shall always waver, so I must try not to. My determination I find greatly strengthened by your absence. It’s understandable—so much was tolerable while dallying and philandering secretly with you, so much that I was content to pay in forfeit and sops. But now it seems any single straw will break me.

  Arlington Street

  11 p.m.

  I’ve had it out with Mother. She was pathetic—tamed—and bleated of the loneliness of her life. She thinks Guy’s is a penance. For what? Too much life? Too much love, or too much suffering?

  So my mother was almost reconciled, and I must have had a lull and licked my wound at Belvoir, for it is from there that I write on 4 May 1918:

  John and his wife are too happy. I think all the time how happier we should be. I saw them this morning running about picking flowers and cherry-blossom boughs, and they brought me millions of cowslips, laughing, and asked me to make cowslip-balls for their baby. After lunch I had to take Father to see the pheasant’s nest and found the eggs deserted, which “put him out” again, so leaving him I ran rather exultantly to a far garden I knew of, and there I found so many thousands and profusions of red and white camellias that you would have been by me in the first flash, if summoning by wish or will was possible. All round were high blood-red maple trees and I climbed one because it was a very easy kind of tree and I hadn’t done such a thing for fifteen years. It was so hot and bird-haunted, and so much the day we have waited for, I remember, that I gave up and sobbed on a little stone. There was no one to ask me why I wept, so soon I stopped, but knowing that this year at least my spring is in you, and that alone I might as well be without eyes or ears—better in fact.

  My nerve is wavering terribly about Guy’s—not my determination. I shall loathe so much, not the hours, discomfort and life, but the dirt, suffering, smells and squalors. I had forgotten foot-day and hair-day.

  Guy’s Hospital

  May 8

  Am I not naughty about dates? You said “to please me,” still I can’t keep it in mind. It’s antipathetic, but these days I have to write it on twenty-two charts daily, so I will be good. I arrived this morning and was sent to a women’s surgical ward—not bad, you know, cleanish and a few lovely children, glowing consumptives who shame one very much when the soul bleats or revolts. I lunched at the unusual hour of 11.15 off a portion or parcel of a dreadful past fish. It could not have been worse fish, not even if it had harboured a Jew like Jonah in its stomach for months, so I shall fine down I hope, though tonight I made good with a melon that dear old Venetia sent me the first day, bless her, and mugs of cocoa and toast and butter and cold rice puddings at a “feast” in the kitchen with my co-wardworkers. One has to hide everything. I spent fifteen minutes looking for a suitable cache for the remnants of a melon, a bottle of methylated for sore backs, a cloth and an ounce of margarine, but whenever I thought to have found a niche a nurse would whisper “I shouldn’t leave them there, nurse; the night people know that place.”

  Guy’s

  May 9

  So little time to write. 7.30 a.m. to 8 p.m. and with the exception of ½ for lunch and ¾ for tea, during which I hang my legs in cold water just to calm them, one is not off one’s feet. I don’t remember it being so torturing last time, do you? Perhaps novelty and patriotism stiffened my sinews. It was one of our spring days, but one must lead the leisured life to appreciate weather. I’m glad to say once busy it matters little except to one’s general spirits. The poor don’t notice it at all. Another thing about the poor that surprises me is that when friends, or chiefly relatives, come to see them sick, they as often as not sit in a complete silence for an hour and a half, rather self-consciously too, occasionally broken by “Feelin’ very poorly, dear?” or some such rhetorical remark. But what amazes me about them is their lack of question or curiosity about themselves. They all are afraid of cancer. They have all got it. They have the words “Diagnosis: carcinoma” written over their beds, big. They say as a rule “What is glands? Not cancers, are they?” I say “O no, dear, not cancer,” and there they leave it. There is a lovely woman of thirty-five not unlike me, with a glimmering skin and breasts like the Milo’s, but if you touch them it’s like touching stone, so they were both removed today, and yet she doesn’t ask what’s wrong.

  Claud was at the iron gates at 8 for me and gave me an enormous dinner and half a bottle of Burgundy. A note from Venetia to the effect that Edwin and Alan probably arrive Sat. or Sun. I’m so dead and stale and unignited without you, Duff darling. They won’t love me as much as they did, I’m really afraid, and how broken they will be to find the Dove flown.

  Guy’s

  May 10

  O the pain of the bones of my legs and feet, they send shivers down my back and a dull sickness as I walk the wards. My hands too would frighten tame bulls, and my neck is like the man they couldn’t hang though they tried to six times—from the collar’s sharp grip.

  Do you remember (I think he struck your fancy) the idiot in Boris who wore a saucepan on his white hair and moaned gibberish? I have just such another one, a woman, in my care—a real delight, very old and playing like a child in terrible earnest. Sometimes for three minutes she swims out of her craziness and groans for her “poor, poor brain—it’s that that’s gone, I know it has,” she says, “because I can’t smile and I can’t cry and I’m dreadful afraid to do some harm to those pretty children.” She’s called Mrs 2. The other patients shun her and every day I walk her down to the Light Department. It’s as sensational as the camel coming out of Chu Chin Chow. People stop and watch. Only she’s not easy—it’s more like driving a pig. And when I get her there I leave her on an iron slab, between four old men, syphilitic I guess. They are half-naked and more bled than bladders of shining lard. Their four noses have apparently sucked all the blood from their bodies and scalps (which are the whitest part of them and hairless as china), for these glow like flame in a wax surround. Over them sit four pretty girls directing a blazing light upon them by way of cure. It’s enough to unhinge shaky minds.

  When I returned to my room tonight, tired enough not to think any more of this work beyond bearing, I could scarcely open the door for red and white roses, sent by Ivor—five hundred I should say. It’s a joke. It did give me pleasure.

  Guy’s

  May 12

  I drove home at 9.30 alone (you could not have let me do that—O God to have you), a little fuddled in an open taxi. The searchlights were playing magically and I found myself addressing a very complicated and exacting prayer to the Power of Lives aloud, to the effect that you might not be killed, or might be restored very quick to my very arms, that nothing should touch your face or arms, at least not both arms, but I didn’t mind your leg or rib, and so on for ten minutes before I caught myself up.

  Guy’s

  May 13

  Today, in consequence no doubt of my night out, I dozed off after the bell had rung and woke again to my panic when the watch indicated the hour Home Sister takes her estrade seat above the breakfasters. To come in behind her is punishable. I clapped my uniform over my nakedness, took no look in the glass, and ran 300 yards to the hall holding and tugging at my ungartered stockings. Providence had made my watch two minutes fast, so I thought myself safe as I sank into my chair exactly beneath Sister’s empty chair. But my table of twenty started sniggering, I hoped at my flaming hurry and pantings, then when twenty mouths had whispered it to me I found I was collarless—always ridiculous, you know. Think of yourself stalking into Ava’s with a bare neck and a stud like a star. I was distraught as my great flashing nape was the first thing Sister’s eyes must rise on, after Grace. But a grubby choking collar was handed me through three hundred hands beneath the table from Nurse Philip Sidney sitting in an inconspicuous place, and I swept into port very weary. No. 2 can no longer remember when she has washed and starts loading herself with soaps and brushes as soon as I have got her back to bed. She will speak no word more, and because her arms are swollen I have t
ied her two hands up to a rod above her head, till she looks like a crazy Kamerad. Can the poor mad thing be sleeping? She can’t, I know.

  Guy’s

  May 14

  No. 2 is dying, I think. Her arms are like thighs and her legs are strapped to her bed, which has been removed to a black corner of the ward where she can give no trouble. I have had a sickener today with the treatment of the poor, beginning with the hiding of No. 2, and going on all afternoon with a poor young woman being operated on for appendicitis. She was anaesthetised and then Fripp could not be found. He was discovered, after half an hour of the patient’s unconsciousness, having tea, but even then etiquette prevented his being hurried. In his own time he came and the operation was performed under his supervision by a beginner, while Fripp shouted, “No, no, not like that.” “That’s the mistake you all make.” “There! now you have hashed it; you’ll never get an incision of that sort to heal, my boy,” and then she comes round two hours later and Sister says “Feeling much better, old lady?” The poor must give themselves since they have no money. Money is fine. I think so specially tonight, because Ivor W. picked me up and took me to dinner at Oddenino’s. He paid the taxi £1 on a 4/- clock because “You’re in it,” he said. He gave me a £4 uneatable dinner, with two nice bottles of claret (I thought of you). He bribed the porter £1 to give us a taxi he had secured for another, and bribed the taxi £3 to go to Guy’s when he was set on picking up a theatre customer at ten, so I guess his evening out cost him near a tenner.