Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  It is true, and the cheque for five jimmy o’goblins enclosed is giving you the snail-shells for your ears. They are my favourite jewels. I like them better than either of the paint-boxes, and when I think of you I like to picture you with the earshells and a bang, better even than the aquamarine drops.

  The head of Conrad’s house was the Duke of Bedford, grandfather of the present Duke. His wife, “the Flying Duchess,” often “flipping about the Gold Coast in her Puss Moth,” one day did not return, and the old Duke, then lonely, began to invite very occasionally members of his family to Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire. When Conrad received his summons I made him promise to leave no detail unnoted. The following description of the Duke’s paramount rule compares strangely with today’s mobocracy:

  Dinner was a choice of fish and a whole partridge each. No drink except inferior claret and not much of it. Nothing else. The second that I had swallowed my peach Herbrand [the Duke] sprang up and we all trooped out. He read the Evening Standard for 1½ hours. Miss Green (companion librarian) had been reading the Flying Duchess’s account of coming to my farm in her diary. She had liked it more than any she had ever seen. “She was envious of having a house like that.” Odd! it’s an ordinary sort of very small house and suits me all right. When we arrived Herbrand was wearing a white silk tie, tweed coat, dark waistcoat, gabardine trousers (much stained and frayed around the bottoms) and very thick black buttoned boots. For dinner he wore a long-tailed coat, black tie, black waistcoat. I’ve got a lovely bedroom, all rosebud curtains and rosebud chintz. It’s the room that Papa always had at Christmas. The bathroom is huge and stinks fearfully on account of rubber flooring. Herbrand said: “I’ve put you on the first floor so that you can see the birds and squirrels better.” As it’s dark I can see neither.

  This is how the day passed. At 9 minutes to 9 we are all assembled in the Canaletto room. At 9 the butler knocks loudly at the door, comes in and bawls: “Breakfast on the table, Your Grace.” Herbrand says: “Well, shall we go to breakfast?” We all file in then. There are five men to wait on us, one for each. Everyone has their own tea or coffee pot. You help yourself to eggs and bacon. The butler takes your plate from you and carries it to your place. You walk behind him. It makes a little procession. As soon as the last person is helped he leaves the room. Herbrand eats a prodigious number of spring onions.

  Glasses of milk, apples and biscuits at 11.30 to keep one going until lunch, which is at 2. Later a comic-opera Rolls dating to 1913 picked us up. Man on box as well as driver, and the back wheels fitted with chains as if for snowy weather. Miss Green held a small butler’s tray on her lap and on the tray stood a Pekinese the size of a basset hound. The tray was supported by a single leg and hitched to the front of the car by green baize straps. By this means the dog’s behind is brought to within a half-inch of one’s nose. There’s no escape.

  We called on Constance and Romola, Lord Ampthill’s daughters. They were sitting indoors in immense beefeater hats and thick cloth coats with brown braid. We all talked and screamed and said the same thing over and over again for forty minutes. Lunch at the Abbey, and afterwards Herbrand offered to send me to Whipsnade: “There’s nothing to do here, you know.” I refused and walked to the Chinese Dairy alone.

  Dinner a repetition of last night. Rough claret, and Herbrand puts a lot of ice in his. Miss Green’s stinking dog sits on a tray on a high chair next to me. On the table is a wooden bowl hollowed out to hold a glass bowl full of ice. The dog licks the ice from time to time during dinner. Clear soup, choice of two fish, grouse, ice, peaches. A.I.

  I enclose a card stolen from my bedroom: “You are particularly requested to refrain from giving a gratuity to any servant.”

  It’s been an experience coming here. Poor Herbrand! What an extraordinary business it is, and how odd that the world should contain places like Woburn and people like Herbrand. It sometimes strikes me as quite unnatural. My family is a zoo, only instead of lions and bears in the cages there are unicorns, chimaeras, cockatrices and hippogriffs.

  After Herbrand’s death Conrad wrote:

  Woburn makes anyone believe in the curse on Church property. There’s been no happy normal life there since Great-Uncle Bedford died in 1861. Since then we’ve had old William, Uncle Bedford, Tavistock, Herbrand and Hastings. It makes six in succession all unhappy, tragic figures. If I had Woburn I’d make it a show place with restaurants, swimming pools, dance-halls, car parks, guides, for four summer months and let the public have a good time, and I’d live there for three months myself in autumn and winter and have huge rollicking house-parties run alternately by you and Lady Wey, and the remaining time I’d live unchanged at Little Claveys with a small London flat.

  * Charlotte Brontë by E. F. Benson (1932)

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Pride of Boot

  A FEW elderly admirers helped to keep me young. My letters bristle and burn with gibes and pretended indifference to their gallantry, yet on them I depended for spoiling and merriment. There was one whom we knew as “The Hound.” On nights when I dined with him Conrad would put me up a candle. “Candle please from 9 p.m. Friday” my telegram might read, and his answer would be “The candle burns brightly for you. I dare say you have need of it.” I placed great reliance on that candle.

  Another admirer loaded me with presents and exciting surprises. An obscure clue over the telephone might lead me to an unused drawer, there to be dazzled by a birthday jewel, or to find a pair of doeskin gloves. Scent from France would be left casually on my dressing-table. Furs in the cupboard at Christmas would dumbfound me, or telegrams on summer evenings at Bognor would send me in a flutter to the station, there to pile up my car with hampers of wine and meats and fruits from Fortnum’s and boxes and boxes of flowers, too many for the cottage to hold. I wrote to Conrad:

  Gower Street

  B. offered me, between 5 and 7, an ermine cape. I fumbled the acceptance with my usual Betty Boop eyelid-drop (disgusting!). All this nonsense sinks into insignificance compared with the way I coped in the taxi with W.G.’s long-anticipated declaration. I could not have dealt more idiotically with a simple situation. I am at home now ashamed and slightly scared.

  Seriously, I wish you would laugh me out of this “âge dangereux” wallowing state, which drags me into a futile, useless and undignified way of living. Reviewing it this morning, I was appalled. And in this chaos of juggling I am only truly happy with you.

  Conrad replied:

  I wonder if you would be happier if you had occupation and spent less time “wallowing.” It’s a problem. I don’t think you’ll ever have men friends who don’t make love to you, and if you did I don’t think you’d like them. The object of life is happiness. I don’t mean that life is a happy condition. I think it is radically wretched, and that misery, suffering and disappointment are the common fate of man. But we ought to aim at being happy, and what makes one happier than being with congenial people one loves and being loved in return? And in moments of gloom and self-abasement it ought to be some alleviation of misery to think: “Conrad is a man of good judgment and knows me well, and he adores me and thinks me perfect.”

  It is all a question of proportion, I suppose. How much time should be assigned to philandering and how much to graver pursuits? I think you are rather inclined to be morbid on this question of wallowing, and as a man who keeps pigs I don’t think that “wallowing” is a very good name for it. Seeking the society of people who like one is only common sense.

  I wrote to him from Belvoir:

  You will be at your sister Flora’s and I am on the lordly terrace yet. My cold is only a little better. The eyes are bulgy and tired and I feel like the proverbial rag.

  Friday night was A. over the fire at home. Sir Richard Cruise frightened him about his eyes and has stopped him, for the time being, playing golf and reading (his only solaces). He pretends courage and cheerfulness but I (in my belief that everyone reacts exactly as I do) imagined him a soul in torment and
treated him with extravagant and very unusual solicitude. If one could see other’s thoughts one’s behaviour would be O! how simplified. He must have thought me mad, but I visualised him all evening stone-blind with a white stick and a dog.

  Saturday was chores in the morning and, after lunch at Emerald’s, Dame Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D at the Albert Hall, followed by Ethel’s tea party composed of nobs (i.e. Beecham, Virginia Woolf, Laura Lovat and famous musicians) in the open tea-room of Lyons’s shop in Brompton Road!

  I should refuse another present so soon. I should help my fool and his money to keep together, but there it is—I am as weak as water and can’t but be excited to death about the present. It must be called my birthday present (August 29th) and as it’s the equinox, and after the equinox Winter rears its shivering head, do you think it should be furs? One can get a rare lot of good ones for the money this time of year.

  Presents were taken and given too. I loved to give them, cunningly designed and worthy of Conrad only. Kaetchen too had to have his own confections, and Duff only the very best. Rex Whistler, that inspired craftsman, developed my crude ideas into works of art—bookplates and drawings that held many and hidden meanings. Presents at the Belvoir Christ-masses had become super-abundant. “The young Duchess” (my sister-in-law), in her radiant beauty clustered round with five starry children, would dole us out our share of her generosity beneath the topless Christmas tree. Servants and tenants had their fat shares. Traditions were dying hard at Belvoir. My wise father had ordered his sales and affairs in such a way as to leave his heir money to prolong largesse. Aunts and uncles in fearful decrepitude and deafness assembled at Christmas. The children camouflaged them. Now there were five Mannerses, my sister Letty’s five sons and my only child, four years old and my eye’s apple. I wrote to Conrad:

  The train to Belvoir went in five parts, and Nanny and I and the baby sat alone in a first-class carriage while the corridor was jammed-packed with tired standing thirds. What does one do? I pressed them in but they refused for fear of having to pay. I could not pay for them all, could I? Nanny, with a jaundiced eye, was looking as though she should have been carrying a basin on her thighs. At Belvoir no old horses yet except my darling mother. Uncle Charlie too ailing to come.

  Christmas Eve all preparations and stockings and “Don’t come in’s.” Presents have grown to excess this year. Duff’s present from Kakoo, a fur-lined Chinese dressing-gown (designed by me) an enormous success. The young Duchess delighted with it, so I felt relieved. All the snow had gone on Christmas Day in the morning, but the sun shone through the chapel windows and John Julius went to his first service and sang lustily.

  It was in the abundant year of 1933 that Duff and I motored in the summer holidays to stay with Chips Channon in an Austrian schloss that he had taken. We stopped en route in an exquisite German town called Montjoie. There for the first time I saw Nazis—a dreadful revelation. I had not thought that the new temper would be so blatantly apparent. I had not imagined washing-lines of red-and-black swastika flags, nor the tramp-tramp of unarmed Brownshirts. Our next stop was to be at festival-less Bayreuth, but there we found unexpected trams and congestion.

  Inns in forests, I felt, must be near by. Duff, never one for changing plans gleefully, showed patience, and with what German I had picked up from Reinhardt I managed to learn, through questioning a sympathetic crowd, of the hotel that seemed to fulfil my hopes, forest-built by a trout-stream, bathroomed yet simple. So Berneck became our destination, but who would have thought that it held all we asked for and Hitler too? A myrmidon of the Führer named Rosenberg who had met Duff in London, hearing that he was in the hotel, invited him (but not me) to the Chancellor’s suite upstairs. I encouraged him to go and sat for a long while twiddling my thumbs and picturing Duff reforming anti-Christ. When he at last reappeared he brought only tickets for the Nuremberg jamboree and the (to me) disappointing news that he had not seen Hitler. I could do better than that, I thought. I discovered from the porter that his horrible Führer would be leaving at 8 a.m. next day for Nuremberg. If I came down before then, he said, my eyes would see the glory.

  I woke late, and only by throwing on a dressing-gown and tying my hair in a handkerchief to hide the curlers did I get down by eight. There I hid my sordid appearance behind the curtain of a window that looked on to the front approach. A motor-car was drawn up and remained so for a full hour. Meanwhile the lounge was filling with the coffee-drinking faithful who had come like me to see the departure. I dared not come out of my hiding-place, bedraggled slut that I looked, yet in the end come out I had to, and I ran the gauntlet of surprised pilgrims with my eyes closed like an ostrich’s. “Quick,” said the porter in German. “The Führer is leaving now by the back door. Go upstairs and you will see him from the window.” I was up the flight in a trice and in another trice I had opened the first door to my hand and run to the window. There I saw nothing but the cloud of dust kicked by Hitler’s heels, and turning, I met the horrified gaze of an old Hun in bed. He was more flabbergasted by me than I was by him. I scuttled away mumbling apologies.

  At Nuremberg the beautiful town had an extra million Nazis in possession. The organisation impressed us. No cars were allowed within a certain periphery, but parking was painless. Luncheon in some vast restaurant was smoothly planned and deftly served. True, we had Hitler’s permits to flourish. I ate my trout in excitement and also in nervous apprehension. I knew Duff’s feelings too well to hope that we should get through the day without trouble. Luncheon swallowed, we walked a long hot way to the meeting-hall, where we were ushered into outer chancel seats. It was not long before thunderous acclamation announced the Chancellor’s advent, but it was a very long time before we heard his guttural, discordant, scrannel-speech. He passed, alone and slowly, two feet away from me. I watched him closely as he approached, as he passed, as he retreated, compelling my eyes and memory to register and retain. I found him unusually repellent and should have done so, I am quite sure, had he been a harmless little man. He was in khaki uniform with a leather belt buckled tightly over a quite protuberant paunch, and his figure generally was unknit and flabby. His dank complexion had a fungoid quality, and the famous hypnotic eyes that met mine seemed glazed and without life—dead colourless eyes. The silly mèche of hair I was prepared for. The smallness of his occiput was unexpected. His physique on the whole was ignoble.

  Slowly he took up his position on the platform alone, while we listened to forty delightful minutes of Wagner played by an orchestra. Then came the speech, read into a microphone. It was not the main speech of the meeting (that was made later in the Square) and in fact I do not know what it was, as we neither of us understood a word of his cacophony. My wish to see Hitler now fulfilled, Duff was only too delighted to leave the hall quarter-way through the oration. We crept out, not unnoticed. Trouble came. It was bound to, and I am only glad that it was no worse and that we did not land in a cell. The roads were empty when we emerged guiltily from the hall. I was footsore and hot, and the way that we had come was closed. A much longer one was indicated to us. Duff asked a Brownshirt to allow us the shorter way. The request was refused gruffly. An older official, not a Brownshirt, came up to help. The young Nazi told him to go to hell. I could see Duff’s temper flaming into his dear face, and only by tearful entreaty did I get him away from the loathsome Nazi-boy. But I am glad that my eyes and my memory obeyed me, and that I can see Hitler and his background as clearly as a photograph.

  I did not see Mussolini, but Duff did the following spring. We went to Rome, I think semi-officially, and Duff had an interview with the Duce. We made great fun of the preparations, dressing him as one might a child for a party, with clean socks and injunctions of good behaviour and final queries of “Are your nails nice? Where’s your clean hanky?” I deposited him at the Palazzo Venezia’s colossal entrance. He was dreading the long walk, so often told of, on slippery surfaces to the Duce’s desk, but this he did not have to negotiate, because Mussolini me
t him at the door and laughed at his jokes. In his autobiography Duff has given him some charity.

  It was after our visit to Nuremberg, when Duff told the Junior Imperial League that Germany was preparing for war on a scale and with an enthusiasm unmatched in history, that he was labelled (by, I am sorry to say, the Daily Express) “a warmonger.” We were due to lunch with the German Ambassador, Leopold Hoesch, on the day of that press outburst. Duff asked him if he still wanted us to come. He treated the matter as a joke and said that he was expecting us. It was in his instructive arms that I had waltzed all 1912 and 1913, and I was fond of him through war and peace. Two years later he was liquidated—through foul play, I have personally no doubt. Duff would never agree with this, but there is good evidence. Besides, Leopold Hoesch was no Nazi.

  Financial Secretary to the Treasury was the last step to Cabinet rank, it was said, and in June 1934 Duff was given that coveted post. I was becoming more ambitious for him politically, but I did not yearn for 10 Downing Street. The thought, if I did think of it, appalled me. The old fear of “bloomers” being made, with constant gruelling work, no time for writing and no leisure of our own, easily dispelled aspirations for Prime Ministership. Duff was writing an official life of Haig. I cannot see how he had had the time (week-ends and holidays, I assume) but now at the Treasury there were to be more free days. My ambitions led me to giving a series of dinner-parties at the House of Commons. There one could take a private room and, with trouble and careful ordering, arrange a very good meal. Enjoyable I found these candle-lit dinners with a nucleus of twelve friends. During the evening Duff could return from a division with Winston Churchill or Walter Elliot, Shakes Morrison or Brendan Bracken, Ministers or back-benchers, to drink a glass of champagne and jaw and smoke and argue. Only in England could this happen, and it is what most I miss living abroad. I even dared to ask Mr Baldwin to dinner at Gower Street. To Conrad I wrote: