Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  Meanwhile Duff in England was working and playing for all he was worth, constituency hard labour, lectures, stumping the country, writing articles tirelessly about the League of Nations. Again his daily letters are mellow bells to my scrannel pipes. They tell of politics and fun, interests, sport, scandals and side-splitting jokes. There is plenty of genuine distress at my absence, but they are still bright with life’s colour. Everything goes well. “It started foggy, but by the time I arrived the day was sparkling.” He travelled (as we all did, however poor) with his servant, the pompous scoundrel Holbrook. All doors were open to him—my sisters’, the Montagus’, Ancasters’, Wimbornes’, Wallaces’ and Ednams’, Belvoir and Wilton, and Cliveden on political Sundays. He shot over moors and in high pheasant-woods, and at Drummond he had one shot at his stalked stag and killed it dead.

  A happy death, his does nearby, having just eaten a delicious meal of fresh grass.

  Holbrook is more exasperating out shooting than at any time. I shall end by shooting him. When it pours with rain and he is obviously half-frozen and out of breath, carrying both my guns and a shooting-stick, he does a hypocritical Mark Tapley that makes me see red. He will also use the wrong technical terms and after all these years he fails to distinguish between a hare and a rabbit. Today when an enormous hare was lolloping slowly towards me in the centre of a perfectly open space, he hissed into my ear in a tone of tense excitement: “Very large rabbit coming up in front, sir.” He never marks a bird and today put the crown on everything by allowing a wounded bird which he had picked up to fly straight out of his hands and get clean away.

  Did I tell you about the nice taxi-driver who took me to the station? “’Ow’s ’er Ladyship?” he asked. I said that you were in America. “I know that,” he replied. “Is she ’aving a great time there? Going great guns?” I said you were. “That’s right,” he said.

  In London when he wasn’t at the House of Commons he was at delightful dinners of wealth and luxury, in Bohemia or in the clubs (White’s, Buck’s or the Garrick). The boon companions were Maurice Baring, Hilaire Belloc, Tommy Bouch, Michael Herbert and his brother Sidney, now a Member of Parliament and Secretary to the Prime Minister, Mr Baldwin.

  Sat with them at Buck’s round the fire talking nonsense and roaring with laughter until five.

  My turned-down mouth watered, not for his doings but for his nature and outlook. The only note of disappointment in all these months of letters was when the Manchester Guardian tipped him as Under-Secretary to the Foreign Office, and another man was given the post. Who but Duff would have dared to hope for so fine an appointment after one year in the House? He wrote: “The choice of Locker-Lampson is a wise one.”

  I was back for Easter. Duff met me unexpectedly at Cherbourg. It was dawn, and he was cold and wet with spray from the tender, and for a moment in the half-light I thought that he was a seal. Winter’s rains and ruins were over. He took me to Madrid, Seville and Granada on a honeymoon as flawless as the first.

  *

  The General Strike was brewing, and in May it broke upon us. At Breccles, after an English spring Sunday of young green and broken sun and cloud, we heard the menacing news. The same sun and green mocked us next day as we motored to London. My heart was deep down in my boots, and I could hardly speak. Duff admitted later to a feeling of sick anxiety, but he did not show it at the time, leaving me to feel myself the yellow streak of the party. I could hear the tumbrils rolling and heads sneezing into the baskets, and yet and yet, the English could not be like that. Then where would it end? The buses were out, so there were jobs to be done driving workers home to Dalston or Hackney. I remember depressed huddled little lunches at Gower Street, with Maurice unnaturally despondent and the normally robust plunged in gloom. Belloc alone seemed totally unmoved and in the highest spirits. The wireless for the first time became to us a necessity. The sky in memory seems dark, pitch-dark at noon. Every day increased the vast hordes of strikers, but, as always in full crisis, the sinews stiffened. All despondency evaporated. Maurice was again A.D.C. to Trenchard. The club boys became special constables. My brother was on night duty from nine to six a.m. Some foolhardies were driving buses and trains. I was a freelance, driving Duff, taking stranded workers home in my car, telephoning Max Beaverbrook for news and being connected to him by Edwina Mountbatten and Jean Norton, who were operating the Daily Express switchboard.

  Winston, in full spate, was bringing out a Government news-sheet. Mr Baldwin was keeping our equilibrium by wise speeches on the radio. The papers must have been brought back to life, for I remember distributing Sunday Expresses and Duff folded The Times after the House rose. He forbade me to join these volunteers, I can’t remember why (for fear of picketing perhaps), but join them I did and folded papers back to back with him all through the nights. He never knew until we both received the silver matchbox, engraved with a joke about “Strike,” given by The Times to all helpers.

  The 13th of May was a lucky day (perils past, as we thought), so Venetia and I took ship for France. The porters at Dover were all undergraduates, and never was there a more hilarious crowd of relieved passengers and trolley-happy porters. The boat was loaded in a flash. Women and children were the first to fall before the onrush of laughing students. Feet were crushed by wheels, hats were flying, as the suitcases on running shoulders shot their way through. The cheers could be heard at Calais as we moved out of port. We did not know until next day that the 13th had been a day of renewed fear, as the strikers were said to be still out, but by the evening triumph was assured, thanks to our splendid Mr Baldwin.

  Duff was hard-worked that summer, but in August the magic of Venice wrapped us round. Leaving it, we stumbled upon a gleaming milestone. We felt rich, and seeing (of all things) a small Fiat motor-car in a Venetian shop-window, we bought it and once again took to the delights and hazards of the road. We drove to Garda, the unspoilt lake, along the little untrafficked road that led through cypress and myrtle, lemons and oleanders, to Riva. As usual we settled to live there, a decision taken for the twentieth time. We stopped a stranger and asked him whether an unfinished pillared villa was for sale. He did not know, he said, nor care, but he would show us what he himself had just taken. We went down a cypress-sentinelled hill to a point of land silver with olives, and there was his inn, once no doubt a cloistered house, with room in its stone port to hold one fishing-boat with its lemon Venetian sail. We could not stay then, but from that day until 1953 hardly a year of peacetime passed without a week or more of heart’s content at San Vigilio. It is for me a shrine of felicity.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Reinhardt Circus

  IN October Iris and I set off, well-advertised missionaries, for the second tour of The Miracle in the United States. Duff was to come for our three or four weeks in Philadelphia, and Kaetchen arranged for him to give a few lectures within easy reach. I loved Philadelphia for its blazon of October and for having Duff to cook for, as well as Iris’s eleven-year-old son, Ivan Moffat. Duff’s lectures I never heard, but they helped me one tormented evening on my pillar when a bug from the property-room found a home in the felt that lined my crown, and tried to eat its way out through my forehead. Ignorant of the cause of the unendurable irritation and fertile at finding panaceas for the hopeless, I arranged that the more uneasy my crowned head the more feathered Duff’s cap. He told me (perhaps in thanks) that he never gave a better lecture than that night. Too soon he left us, and our cathedral moved to Kansas City, the heart of America. From the train I wrote to Duff:

  I love the negro porters, though I’ve just been humiliated by one. I was intolerant with him earlier in the day, so now every time he comes in he asks me if I’m still angry and says he doesn’t mind men being cross but can’t stand it from ladies. He looks at Iris and says: “You’re ma friend.” I hope that he’ll forgive me soon.

  We are in a big saloon that turns into an observation car. Each seat had a cuspidor but as we got in early I kicked them all under the
individual chairs. Now I can see all the old hicks looking for them mouth-full.

  Kansas City

  The Mayor and Chamber of Commerce were on the platform with the whole Miracle cast and bouquets to suffocate, fireworks and flares, moving pictures and two Rolls Royces to take us to the Ambassador Hotel, where Mr Tipple the manager and all the staff received us, bowing low and putting a lot of “Your Ladyships” in. This silent, subservient, furtive man had filled our kitchen with groceries and fruit and our two sitting-rooms with flowers, and he had supper prepared for us. The reporters were let in, and we were interviewed acting languidly as tired temperamentals should, but alas! what an awakening disillusion to them all and to the waiters and neighbours when in rushed the bright young things of The Miracle all a bit tight, Fritzie, the new Spielmann, telephoning to all his new acquaintances for hootch. Mr Tipple finally produced a bottle of Bourbon (his tipple) and a ukulele was found and the victrola wound up, and a beastly baby doll was produced and jokes made about “changing” the baby, and bath towels brought, and common laughs rang out. But it served to divert me from my distance-phobia in the heart of America and the growing trouble of “deserts divide us, and the waste of seas.”

  The little Fiat bought in Venice sat sadly in a London garage. One night on the pillar I had a winged thought, quickly flown to England and followed by this letter:

  23 November 1926

  It’s about giving a motor to Mother. I’ve thought of a wonderful plan. It’s to be a great surprise. You must call her up a few days before Christmas and say “Diana has sent you a present. Will you be in if I send it round?” Then send it. Please, Duffy, get up early one morning and go to the Fiat people and effect an exchange. Get a sedan or limousine, one with the driver sitting outside, but compact, small and smart, if there is time painted her own middle-greenish-blue with peacock and coronet on the door, and then get a chauffeur found by Holbrook, a non-drunk from some country repair-shop preferably, nice appearance, all there, neat chauffeur’s coat and cap. I can well afford this and I cannot have “my Mummy” walking and denying herself taxis, which she does for my sake through the cold wet weather. It must be kept a secret or she will obstruct the plan. I feel ashamed that I have not done it before. The chauffeur must have willingness for unusual jobs. The readiness is all. For advice ask brother John. Don’t let him deter you by saying that she has a car at Belvoir. She’ll never use that Renault. I know her too well. It’s too big and too expensive in tax and upkeep. I am to pay the man’s salary. See to the inside—she likes light-coloured lining and pulleys at the side-windows and somewhere for a looking-glass and pencils and paper. I hope that this letter won’t worry you. I’m enjoying the idea so much myself. My ordeal on the pillar this afternoon went in a flash thinking about it.

  It’s snowing hard. I went out riding on Sunshine. I never met a horse as nice as Sunshine. She is tall and chestnut and five-gaited, which is new to me. It’s like bicycling. You need not rise to the occasion. She brewed more of that shaving-foam than it took to smother me.

  I’m eating a lot to keep the wolf from the face. Thanksgiving Day feast up here tomorrow (Mr Tipple’s treat). We’ve asked four or five of the cast and young von Hofmannsthal. Thank God Kaetchen won’t have arrived to act the skeleton black cat at the feast.

  Next day

  Raimund [von Hofmannsthal] doesn’t know about riding yet and it isn’t too safe. He has thought of the clever expedient of tying the snaffle round his horse’s neck and grabbing the curb in which he puts a knot that he may get more purchase. He is becoming a bel ami to these Dolls.

  Kaetchen has returned fatter and in good temper. He has been brushing Iris’s hair (an hour’s “treat”) cigarette in mouth, holding her down with one weak hand and brushing up with the other. He is filling the hotwater bottles now.

  Kansas City

  We’re properly launched into the social set of Kansas City. Kaetchen came to call us this morning with one of his worst and most repellent colds that make him intolerable and morbid. A party had been arranged for us after the two performances and I could see that he had been brooding and brooding on “the feast that leads to so much more.” He’s leaving tonight, poor Kaetchen, and all the cast’s and the new friends’ faces are wreathed in smiles. Is it not horrid? I really adore Kaetchen. I am undeserving of good things, ungrateful, cold and spoilt, and the wanton waste of true affection will assuredly lead to woeful want of it. Still he does keep us too imprisoned and fearful of his humours, and now he pays for it.

  I fuss a lot about “my Mummy” and the pain in her back. She is like me, of course. If it’s not one thing it’s another.

  Almost-daily telegrams in verse were exchanged with Kaetchen, set to the tune of the Weeping Willow Tree. Iris was the best lyricist. Kaetchen’s rhymes were shaky in metre but imaginative. I have volumes of them bound in Kaetchen’s all-covering morocco, and sometimes I croon them and feel like my mother’s maid Barbara singing a song of Willow. The jokes have faded from obscurity into meaninglessness, but one can trace the cruel “treats” broken to the jealous Kat in verse.

  Raimund von Hofmannsthal had since Philadephia been an apple of discord. Kaetchen had brought him to The Miracle as a means for him to work his passage to California, where he was to forge his fortune. He was nineteen, spoke no word of English, and the Kat could not miaow in French. He was Austrian, intelligent and made in our mould, unlike the other supernumeraries. He was shy and strange and clearly needed protection and affection. We revered and loved his father. It was natural therefore that we should first invite him to drug-store snacks, and then to share kitchenette meals in our flat. Raimund played a pilgrim (not a strenuous part) and a wounded soldier with a blood-stained cloth round his head. He had to kneel and pray before the miraculous statue, and at other times to run about the church in the dream-world with the rest of the surging crowd. Kaetchen disapproved of favouritising one of a vast cast. He was jealous, so the drugstore snacks were criticised, and pot-luck at home could cause bad sulks. Raimund standing nightly at the stage-door as we came out and silently and very shyly offering me a cigarette would be enough to blanch Kaetchen like an almond. I fear that this attempted embargo upon him only sharpened our wish for Raimund’s protection and company. He earned thirty dollars a week on tour, and had to travel (two men to a bed) on the special Miracle train. As we had promised Kaetchen not to pay for his snacks, the poor thing was reduced to quelling his hunger-pains with the cheapest thing on the menu, a cheese sandwich at twenty-five cents. The growing boy often had to watch Iris savouring a juicy steak and me gobbling prawns and Russian dressing. In Kansas City, Kaetchen’s supervision gone, he was with us at all times.

  As the end of the season drew near, the plans for our ten days of freedom crystallised themselves into taking the train to Santa Fé, where Iris knew a Russian horseman. One night on returning to our flat, we found a letter from Raimund to Iris asking her to meet him alone in the coffee-shop of the hotel. I fevered myself to sickness, imagining that he had come on Kaetchen’s instructions to break, via her to me, the news of Duff’s death. It was relieving and exhilarating to be told that Raimund had only begged to join us on our liberty-trip. He had telegraphed to his father for money, he said, but if it did not come in time he could beg, borrow or steal it. He knew that in duty to himself nothing must obstruct this glamorous and educational adventure. Jailer Kaetchen’s place was with Reinhardt in New York. They were both to join us ten days later in San Francisco. The truth must be told, so the verse was sent by the telegram that was to put Kaetchen in torment:

  For fear of hold-ups on the road and birds of prey

  Two Dolls who are so grave and gay

  Took a cavalier

  Not unrelated to a foreign bard,

  But if our Cat is black, why then

  All pleasure’s marred.

  I remember hesitating to administer so cruel a hurt, but once it was in Western Union’s clutch we put repentance behind us and, like bad chi
ldren, were off without remorse to the Western outfitter of Kansas City for an orgy of “dude” buying. We stuck at “chaps,” but our boots were best-quality black kangaroo (stitched and square-toed as for the Armada), the shirts were checked and the belts coin-studded. Raimund came in for some equipment too and for a reservation on the train, and away we steamed with a great platform send-off from local “flames” and “sparks,” who overwhelmed us with drinks and “glossies,” flowers and chocolates, maps and mascots. My spirits had risen tremendously since arrival at Kansas City unencumbered, with a gay Austrian playmate, and with California, man’s traditional Promised Land, ahead.

  Our plan with our Rai is to entrain early, get to Santa Fe thirty hours later at noon, stay four days and join the train at Albuquerque on Friday. A few hours in the Grand Canyon, then we pick up the train for San Francisco. Are we not adventurous? We are calling on D. H. Lawrence at Taos and on Brett, Lord Esher’s daughter, an old Slade School chum.

  All that I had hoped for was fulfilled by adobe-built Santa Fe and motoring with kind strangers eighty miles to Taos, still uncontaminated by petrol-pumps and cameras, with “white lightning” in a gigantic flask, brought by our leader Randal Davey and opened every half-hour to keep the great cold out.

  I’m in transports about the swathed Indians and the two buildings looking exactly like the whole of Bethlehem (which town I never saw) and the colour of a Jersey cow. We drove to see Miss Dodge. Lawrence wasn’t there, no matter, but Brett was, and so happy in her isolation, and so was Miss D’s husband, a blanket Injun, with no conversation but “Ugh!” His recreation is playing pool. The house was full of local art plus Louis XV furniture and good Impressionist paintings. Brett I used to see at the Slade. Deaf now with a trumpet, living twenty miles away without a servant, she had come down to Taos, for the snow threatened to cut her off from milk and bread. She never wishes to leave her hill and nearly collapsed when she heard that Iris and I were on the stage.