Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  Mrs C.

  I told her she was beautiful, it’s true;

  But I said nothing when I wrote to you.

  I, no poet, could only quote:

  Nothing shall come of nothing; speak again!

  Next day’s Times brought Maurice’s answer:

  Yet out of nothing God made time and space,

  The stars, the sun, the summer and your face.

  In September 1928 Duff went to Geneva as a delegate to the League of Nations. He was a believer in, and an active worker for, the poor League, and he gave twenty-eight lectures about it in 1927 and 1928. I went with him to Geneva and saw Switzerland as a microcosm of the civilised world as it should be—the one-in-three of countries, languages and costumes, federated and tolerant. Ever since I have had perhaps an exaggerated love for this peaceful town and its traditions of exile and romance, for its toy steamers, its Coppets and Ferneys, its Protestants’ Wall, and for the hope that the League was there fostering. (With my little eye I saw it die, for I was there again at Munich-time.) The whole set-up I found inspiring and diverting; the delegates’ difficulty in accepting alphabetical placement à table, the miraculous interpreters (faster than echo and more intelligible), and hearing Aristide Briand (in gloves) speak with a voice too harmonious for the words to count. Duff enjoyed it less. He gave a magnificent second-sighted lecture on the imminence of barbarians. He was in serious vein and had not time to share my freedom of the Lake or to join a Dalcroze eurythmic class, or to go to the circuses and concerts, nor could he quizz the stuffier delegates. But we had Belloc to delight us both. He was what he called “walking over the Jura” with his faithful “Bear” Warre. From their account they had done more singing than walking. We had Pertinax for seriousness and Arnold Bennett for humour and diversion. Bathing in the Lake of Annecy, I introduced him to Lady Horner. They shook hands treading water. They were both over sixty.

  We had motored to Geneva and thought now of driving to Sicily for the last summer sun, so beneficial to Duff. Finding that it was too long a drive, we thought to board a ship at Genoa that would land us at Syracuse. Such a boat there was, the Ausonia, bound for Alexandria, but unwilling to take passengers further than Sicily. I appealed with little hope to an Italian colleague, who asked for time to telegraph. The next day he told me that all was arranged. We had but to call at Genoa for the tickets to take us there and back. At Genoa they were handed to Duff together with the money paid out in Geneva and a free return-berth for the car. Aboard we were shown into the bridal suite. I see it now as carved out of ivory, with fluttering white silk and a crystal bath. This was my first whiff of Mussolini.

  It must not be imagined that I did not pay for all these rainbow windfalls. They only sharpened my anxieties. If Duff was late in Taormina, I would imagine that he had gone on his own to Etna and been sucked into the crater. How many times in London have I not, after hours of Sister-Anning at the window, rung up the police-station to ask if there had been any possible accident to one A. D. Cooper with his name stitched in his suit-pocket? I thought: “If I am like this about my husband, it is as well that I have no child.” Indeed, I had made the best of my barrenness and persuaded myself that children were sharper than serpents’ teeth. Girls were sure to be plain and without virtue, boys dishonest, even queer, and certainly gambling drunkards.

  To be free of nurseries gave me liberty for adventure, so that when our great friend Sidney Herbert, who was starting the cruel illness that was to rob him of his youth and life, asked me to join him on a health journey to Nassau, I went, torn as always by old devotion and by loathing the separation from Duff. Sallying forth this time had some kind of duty in it, that warranted crossing the Atlantic. Through our sea-journey we read aloud poetry and Elizabeth and Essex by Lytton Strachey. At Nassau we lived in the finest hotel on American-planned hygienic food with bad service, instead of the old ant-eaten “digs” with rocking-chairs and tin-openers. The palms and humming-birds had been swept away by hurricanes. Hog Island was already overbuilt. The little town was suffering a horrible earth-change of brick and concrete. Gone was the primitive atmosphere. Where it once consoled, it now irritated. Gone too were the spontaneous parties, the old friends, the turtle-feasts and the market. Even the sea, though still volatile as ether, and the blinding coral beaches, could not compare with the old New Providence of 1924. I could find no calm. Sidney was not improving in health. Besides, my mind was all but closed to outer things. It was totally wrapped in whether or not I was going to have a child. I was alive to that thought only. Not daring to give Duff a hope that might prove a dupe, I wrote to him of the day’s doings, and his letters tell of the War Office, visits to munition factories and to Oldham, Army Estimates, all-night sittings at the House of Commons, the fever and fret of politics taken so blithely, and also of scandals and parties:

  There was a fancy ball at Ava Ribblesdale’s last night, and all the women looked 50% worse than usual—S. as Little Lord Fauntleroy quite awful, P. as a street Arab just dirty. Venetia and I had been to Michael [Herbert]’s where was Willie Clarkson with brilliantined beard and frock coat, his whole apparatus and a lot of French porters’ clothes. Rosemary [Ednam] looked well in your “Artful Dodger.” The rest of us were porters. We thought we were pretty funny all dashing into the room shouting “Porteur, porteur!” Gerald Berners was good as a hunting man with a marvellously funny mask by Oliver Messel. He had announced his intention of going as Nurse Cavell but was dissuaded. Winston as Nero was good. F.E. went as a Cardinal. The dressing-up was of course the best part but spoilt by your not being there, as everything is.

  I was not long away, being every day surer of my secret and anxious to curtail the excursion. Sidney’s brother Michael arrived, so I left my charge in capable hands and fled home. I knew that Duff, not having had to invent a consolatory philosophy as I had, would be happier at the prospect than I, who was only slowly appreciating what was coming to me. I was singing the Magnificat for Duff, not yet for myself, but as the months passed I became obsessed with joy and pride. “Late in time” made this child more to be adored.

  Grotesque in appearance but feeling healthy and unapprehensive (for a change) I flung myself into the General Election of 1929 at Oldham. We never had a hope. The greedy Liberals had determined to run two candidates. Mr Wiggins, the sitting Member (Ned Grigg, the Liberal of our former election, having been translated to the Lords as Lord Altrincham), wisely backed out. As a newcomer he was right, but we felt that forsaking the seat would be a betrayal to our Oldham friends, with whose support Duff had fought and won, and who had been most loyal and undemanding. Once in the fearful fight one loses reasoning-power and is easily blinded to the truth by zealous workers and primrose-wearers. The town was plastered with a picture of Stanley Baldwin, looking as shifty as a coward caught, labelled “Safety First” (the most uninspiring, un-English slogan ever shouted). No longer the knock-about turn that I had been in 1924, and unable to clog-dance or be merry, I dragged myself around, a conspicuously expectant mother. The night before the count we were called back from Manchester after the polling-booths had closed, to have our silly hopes fanned by the scenes of enthusiasm in Oldham. I suppose that the Labour Party felt too secure to demonstrate and had gone to bed, leaving the streets free to wildly shouting Conservatives waving their colours confidently. Next day the defeat was announced. I was so preoccupied with myself that I could have taken it calmly had it not been for the tears of the women and girls. They wore blue hats, and we called them “the bluebells.” Their disappointment after so determined and tireless a tussle nearly broke my heart, to say nothing of the handsome bouquet, prepared and inscribed to the victor’s wife, that the vanquished must accept. Thank God I was never again part of a lost election. We were not the only losers. The tide was against the old Government, and the Labour Buggins had to be given his chance.

  Our seaside haven was still unravished, and there we retired from worldly labours, Duff to start his book on Talleyrand and I to mar
vel and dream about my child, very happy though a little apprehensive, marking auguries and omens. A sitting hare would not get out of the way of our car. This, to one who had read Mary Webb’s Precious Bane, augured a hare-lip for my baby. Most disquieting to me, though worse for the reader, was a short story by Max Beerbohm read aloud to us by Desmond MacCarthy.* It is graven on my memory because I knew before he did how the story ended, yet I dared not stop him. I should have created some diversion. The tale described the lodge of a seaside house (the actual one in which we were living) where dwelt William and Mary, the loving husband and wife—he the “man of genius” in her eyes, she the “brave little woman” in Max (the gentleman from London)‘s banter. The story stood fair for tragedy. William and Mary were too happy, and when that happiness was fulfilled and a child was expected one knew the end. Mary had no misgivings, but it was destined that her child should live only for an hour and that she should die bearing it. William wrecks his world-weary bark on some war rocks and the story-teller comes back to the forsaken Bognor cottage, to the house that he had known once littered with books from William’s shelves and bright with flowers from Mary’s garden, and finds the grass obliterating it, the stucco fallen from the walls, the once-open door shut and knockerless, only the keyhole to peep through into “darkness impenetrable,” and the bell that he rings and rings to hear again Mary’s enchanting laughter echoing out of the past.

  In September 1929 we moved to London, I into Lady Carnarvon’s nursing home in Portland Place for my Cæsarean section. Silently I said goodbye to Gower Street for ever. It was a lovely evening, and I felt how sad it was for us both that such happiness should end. I sent a lot of telegrams by telephone to nearest friends announcing the operation for next day, and ending: “Pray for me.” A telephone girl said: “May I do the same?” Next morning I went to the operating theatre and when I woke I was told that I was the mother of a boy, but I could not, I suppose, believe it, for I asked over and over again all day. I had prepared Duff for the hare-lip and when in a state of great emotion he asked to look at his son they told him that he might not see him until he had spoken to the doctor. This seemed to confirm the dread, but John Julius was a perfect child and has in my eyes remained so. I was very ill for a day, very near death, but soon was gloriously well and taken on a stretcher to my home. Crowds outside the clinic door, all wishing me well, made me cry terribly, because I was still weak. Some of the hundreds of letters written me by strangers were from mothers who had just lost their newborn child. I remember minding so much that I was no longer allowed my letters unopened.

  I asked a great many people to be godfathers and godmothers, as they did in fairy-tales, and no bad fairy came. There were Maurice, Otto Kahn and the Aga Khan, brother John and Sidney Herbert, J. M. Barrie, Margot Oxford (because she asked to be), Max Beaverbrook, Betty Cranborne, Ethel Russell in America and, of course, Kaetchen. I hated to have the baby out of my arms and used to take him shopping, wrapped in a swaddling cashmere shawl with his monogram in blue, lay him on the counter and buy what I wanted while the shop-girls worshipped the bundle. I had the best of all nannies, Nanny Ayto, to care for him and teach him goodness. She still at times looks after his own child Artemis.

  Duff and I took Sidney Herbert to Nassau again in 1930, and this time it was still sadder. He was getting no better, and was soon to lose his leg. It was staying with him earlier this year at his pretty house at Lympne that I feared a tidal wave might drown Duff, and in fact it almost did. The Sunday afternoon was unusually hot and still, so still that lying on my bed I got up to look and wonder how and why the trees had become like a painting. Even animal-sounds had ceased. I felt it too eerie to bear, and as I looked a bank of black cloud rolled up from the distant sea, bringing with it a rustle that turned to a tempest of sound and movement. I tore down to the others, playing bridge and unconscious of anything but trumps, to ask where Duff was. He had gone to bathe with Bobbety Cranborne, they told me. “O God, he’ll be in the tidal wave!” I shrieked. Roars of laughter and accusations of “really going too far this time,” and a painful wait for me—no news not good news, as there never would be news of men taken by a tidal wave. At last I saw them arrive and heard to my triumph of the South Coast’s famous tidal wave that had swept away bathing-huts and chairs for miles. Duff was in his half-depth when Bobbety on shore shouted to him to look and hurry. He looked back at a wall of water and ran in the nightmare obstruction of shallow water. “He came up the shingle white with exhaustion,” said Bobbety.

  Recovered, Duff was offered a new constituency at Winchester. He nursed it for a year, but with all its beauty and accessibility, one could not put one’s heart into Winchester as one had done into Oldham. One’s shoulder, yes, and a lot of shoulder it needed. Country constituencies are far more demanding. Every flower-show and little bazaar claims one’s presence, and more is thought of the Member’s attendance and social grace than of getting him to the top at Westminster. Oldham had been very proud of having Winston as their Member; I am sure that they still feel in part responsible for his zenith, and they were inordinately proud of Duff when he reached the Admiralty. I took a four-roomed panelled Queen Anne house at Winchester, a workman’s dwelling in a churchyard of crooked gravestones bound in briars. The rent was a pound a week. No sooner was the bath installed and the panels painted than a hullabaloo started about the by-election in the St George’s division of Westminster, caused by the death of Duff’s former chief, Sir Laming Worthington-Evans. The back-benchers, impatient with Mr Baldwin’s leadership of the Opposition, saw an opportunity (with the help of the noisiest Conservative newspapers, already in full cry) to bring him down.

  Duff was lecturing in Sweden. I was enjoying the tour to the top of my bent, enjoying the snow and the ice-floes, the unfamiliar towns, the food of reindeers’ tongues and Baltic shrimps, and the warm hospitality that lapped us round in small provincial houses as well as in the Royal Palace at Stockholm. (I remember seeing the King riding a bicycle and one day, taking us to the door after his family luncheon, asking us whether we would walk or wait while he fetched us a taxi.)

  Suddenly, by telephone from London, a new fervently loved friend, Lord Ashfield, told us that no challenger had appeared in St George’s. The lists were open. No one seemed prepared to fight this safest of all Conservative seats. What few considered taking up their leader Mr Baldwin’s cudgels feared to fight that two-handed engine, the Daily Express and Daily Mail. No giants could frighten Duff, who came home hell for leather like St George himself to fight the dragons. My timorous heart quailed, not without cause. Besides, I loved Lord Beaverbrook and it was a fight to the death with him personally, since Sir Ernest Petter, the Press Lords’ candidate, was but a man of straw. Lord Rothermere, the other dragon, fought with his newspaper, but Max Beaverbrook had his oratorical dynamism as an extra and formidable weapon. Mayfair, Belgravia, Victoria, Pimlico and many other wards in the heart of London were up in arms, and it was civil war, brother against brother. Lord Ashfield put a motor at our disposal. In it every morning lay a white camellia to pin in my cap (strange what things are never forgotten). As against this encouragement Lady Hartington, thinking me a normal candidate’s wife and not platform-dumb, booked me for a series of meetings. I was to be responsible, if I remember rightly, for the domestic staffs. It not being thinkable to let her down, I managed somehow, by reading aloud endless messages from Duff with (I hoped) comic interjections, a sort of Charlie Chaplin turn. It was all far more like an election in a Disraeli novel than the Oldham and Winchester campaigns I was used to. Mayfair went mad. Never for a century had they had a fighting election, and they were feverishly excited. “Aux armes, aristos!” Duff and Max met before the fray like knights before a tourney. Max advised Duff not to blunt his lance. “Say what you like about me. I shall mind less than you will mind what I say about you.” It was nobly said, though in the end Duff’s armour had the fewer chinks, for Max never quite forgave him his victory. I was in touch with the enemy
by telephone all through the battle. Again he behaved with nobility when Duff in a speech overstepped some limit, and Max deliberately overlooked the solecism. It could have had no effect upon the election’s outcome, but it could have put Duff in the wrong and made a great coil for him.

  I think that everyone but myself enjoyed the fray uproariously. Members of Parliament were thumping the tub and bawling their lungs out at street-corners. This was no baby-or butcher-kissing election. The gloves were off. My mother and Lady Cunard used fearlessly to attend the opponents’ meetings, which were sometimes very rough. I remember hearing of one that was held at the Grosvenor Gallery, where chairs were flung and broken. My mother calmly described herself as having been “all right under a table.” Emerald Cunard would go early, take a front seat in the hall and ostentatiously read a pro-Baldwin paper. The Star was one and the Daily Telegraph another. Whenever either Lord Beaverbrook’s or Lord Rothermere’s name was mentioned, she would look up and and mutter loudly: “Degenerates; they’re both degenerates!”

  After the hurly-burly some great or lesser house, the Londonderrys’ or Juliet Duff’s or Portia Stanley’s, would spread an open supper-table with hot soup and restoratives for the fighting men and women. Prognostications were fifty-fifty. It was entirely guesswork. One night there would be bad news about Bond Street, another day about the domestic staffs or all Pimlico. It murdered my sleep, but Duff enjoyed it and with cause. The Daily Mail called him “Mickey Mouse,” meant pejoratively, though Mickey is as gallant a mouse as ever gnawed a lion’s net.