Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  Back at 5.30 for a cocktail party on Enchantress—boiling cocktails, sodden cakes, but no matter: it was short and sharp and orderly. Next a scramble to bath John Julius and to dress for another party on Rodney. My heart was rather failing me at a third meal next the Commander-in-Chief, but his was too, apparently, because he gave me two other sailor boys. One called Storey I delighted in because he had been blown up in the Queen Mary at Jutland and is one of nineteen survivors. After dinner we repaired to the Warrant Officers’ mess, which was my cup of tea, playing darts and winning, and Duff playing table-tennis with the champion player, putting up a splendid show (19-21) and cheered to the echo. We’ve got very chummy with our shipmates, so returning at 11.30 we settled down to beer and a discussion of the evening.

  This morning John Julius and I have been over the Swordfish (submarine) a great thrill and dreadful too, quite dreadful. I’m just back from it and trying to keep calm about Duff going down in one this afternoon, down to the depths of the sea. Will his bones make coral?

  It’s hard to write on account of there being but one sitting-room and always being called away to watch Rodney weigh anchor, or cheer Blanche on her way to Spain.

  Now I have got home and Admiralty House is no nearer readiness. Next week we leave for the Pirate Zone (the Mediterranean) in that very tiny yacht.

  In October we were off again, without John Julius and Euan, and in their places came George and Imogen Gage and my niece Liz Paget. We boarded Enchantress at Venice, where I began a long diary to Conrad:

  Raimund von Hofmannsthal and Rex Whistler fly out to see the last of us. There are fears of submarines, incidents, ambushes and watery graves. The cruise is to be very official. Already I groan at the Fascist leaders, prefects and podestas, British Consuls, calls and dinners.

  At the Mocenigo Palace, the scene of Laura Corrigan’s extravaganzas, we meet the paragon Duke of Aosta. He is an extraordinary man, seems nine foot high, speaks eight languages, including whatever one speaks in the desert and in the Congo. His English is too good, with phrases like “not my cup of tea” and “now I suppose you want me to hook it.” Two years at an English school, a fighting soldier at sixteen, back to his books, a bit in the Camel Corps to glamorise him, and two years as a fitter in Lever’s soap-works in the Congo, so the common touch is not lost. A famous flyer, he is now the head of the Italian Air Force and sails his own ship (Master Mariner too) and he has scaled the Matterhorn twice. His manners captivate. At dinner on board he sweeps Captain and crew, First Lord and (perhaps more than anyone) the diarist clean off their feet. I ask him if he knows the Dalmatian coast. “Like my pocket,” he says, and asks for charts to show our captain how to navigate the inlet of Sibenik. I hope so much he liked me in my baroque dress made for King Edward’s party at Blenheim, with all the peonies and amethysts. I did my best, but I can’t really see anything in my cabin.

  The Dalmatian inlet proves a flop and the next stop is Athens, where we can’t land, as we’re too grand and cumbersome to do anything not prearranged with deputations and opposite numbers and the rest of it. So we anchor off Sunium and dine on deck, and throw our searchlight on Poseidon’s temple. Greek mariners returning from trading loved to see it, and Byron carved his name there. Perhaps it was the first sight of Attica for those returning from Troy—no, it wasn’t built then, but they saw the headland and the white foam and thought of their wives.

  The romantic girls want to sleep on deck, and so really do I. They drag their beds up secretly and Duff catches them and isn’t pleased. I drag mine up when he’s gone to bed and he catches me and is cross and frightens the girls, who punish him by treating him as a dragon. We all wake up black as sweeps with coal-dust and that pleases Duff, and tempers are tempered for the long voyage. Every day we stop the ship and bathe and the 150 crew jump over the other side.

  It’s all wonderful, and excitement sends up a spark in the shape of an aggressive Greek gunboat that turns on itself and seems to be about to grapple, but after an exchange of silent coloured courtesies like two suspicious dogs, we both sail away, we into the British (why British?) lee of Skyros. While Duff inspects we are left to explore the little white town and breathe the aromatic smells of the island, dried by summer and graced with olives to save it from aridity, and to criticise the huge nude that commemorates Rupert Brooke and immortal poetry. After a visit to the Malaya and being shaken to pieces by the firing of the biggest gun, we sail away to the strains of Rule Britannia from each ship.

  “Flags,” “Sparks,” “the Chief,” “the Sub” and “the snotties” are weaving in and out of the story, with books read and letters written, as we cut through the blue sea to Rhodes, where I ask in the huge modern State-run hotel for a postcard to send to my dearest farmer, and there isn’t one. But when I come out of the cool sea, wet as a seal, there on the beach is a proper writing-table with rulers, spare nibs, sealing-wax, calendars, a bust of Mussolini and a dozen postcards for my convenience. Banquets and drives with officials, shopping for Turkish coats and net to make curtains for our windows against the wide eyes of sailors, and always the joy of returning to our ship and our delightful company.

  In Cyprus, where the heat is tropical, we land at Kyrenia and find in the courts of Bella Pais two strange Englishmen, highly-informed and amusing. They show us the glories of the troubadour-haunted St Hilarion and tell us of the Kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem. We dine with Sir Richmond and Lady Palmer at Government House, newly built on the ashes of Ronald Storrs’s library, while the orchestra plays the expected Iolanthe in the stifling garden. I talk to a respected Turk who had been to the Coronation and who says that “he is hand in blouse with Lady L.” and that he has “a corn in the flesh” and (best of all) that “he kicked up a rump.” Three malaprops in ten minutes is good going.

  Then there are the Lusignan-built churches, now mosques, French-Gothic, soaring out of palms, with confusing interiors. Two angles of East and Mecca make an extraordinary warring design. The naves take your eyes East, the Mohammedan pulpits and lamps and the laying of the rugs drag them diagonally to Mecca.

  We are away that night from Famagusta, Alexandria-bound, and after Alexandria, where we leave Enchantress, we come to Cairo, which is not at all to my liking—loud and crude and common, and just saved from damning by the Citadel and a twelfth-century mosque and a monastery in a Biblical cave high above the city, where we smoke and drink tea with an old abbot. The pyramids, as seen from the Mena House Hotel, are in place and no surprise, though going inside Cheops’s I find gruesome, without interest, merely appalling discomfort of crouched progress and claustrophobia, and an asphyxiating smell of elephants (which I am told is really bat-stench). Beautifully-caparisoned white donkeys are a happy surprise, and they run willingly and smoothly like bicycles, but their riders deform them. Darkness falls and obliterates tourist-traces by the time we get to the Sphinx, so I deign to be impressed and am impressed too by Tutankhamen’s glitter, though Egyptologists think it common and (worse) vulgar. Sakkara passes muster, as does its archaeologist Mr Emery. In fact he reconciles me to a lot, as do the hook-wormed natives at their agricultural tasks and the brown nudes bathing in brown Nile-water seen through scarlet trees. I am homesick for Enchantress, the only spellbinder, so back to Alexandria.

  Beautifying next at a hairdresser’s, but even the Egyptian coiffeur fails me, and emerging into the sunlight after a cool hour in his transformatory, I find my hair violet (a porphyry renaissance). I look a fright, but what does it matter? There is so much worse to come, because now my handbag (my “face”) has been lost in transit, for all the zealous efficiency of secretaries, and without my face I can’t see how I am to envisage the party on Barham thrown by the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Dudley Pound, tonight at 8.30. In my bag lies all my treasure—the silver ear-snails, the funny pearl ear-rings, the eau-de-nil aquamarines (in this country so appropriate), the half-mourning amethysts, the important diamond dolphins, the trembler (all Conrad’s presents, in fact). Still I keep m
y purple hair on, acting under splendid control and rewarded by news that the Air Force was bringing my bag on wings. The familiar ship’s faces make up for petty disasters, and so does the light springing deck, until Flags comes in to say that the bag won’t arrive until morning and I know again that I shall lose face, and that my skin-disease will begin again if I use other people’s unguents. I get encouraged when a sharp signal is sent to say that it must be here before 8 p.m., and discouraged by the answer saying: “Only if a private plane costing £14 is chartered.” Our signal replies “No” and the next message reads: “Casket sent by RAF due 7.15.” The poor culprit who lost it is sent to the airfield, only to hear: “Airplane delayed will reach Aboukir (forty miles away!) 7.50.” Dinner 8.30, so I leave the ship in the old red-and-white dress and am piped on to Barham plastered in Liz’s brunette muck and fit to cry. Still we dance on deck until midnight, when national anthems play us off.

  Tomorrow the big ship goes out to shoot the biggest guns at a target, and the three cruisers shoot also and exercise in other ways. I say to the Commander-in-Chief that I should love to see it, and he is delighted with the idea and orders Enchantress to follow along and watch the fun. It never strikes me how unpopular it will be to have the anchor weighed, the ship stoked, taken out and made to go full speed ahead for half a day, thereby keeping the officers from tennis and rest. The Commander-in-Chief has got all the blame, thank God! So now we are at sea (Liz, me, Mogs and Flags only—the others are on the flagship) and it’s pitchy and some of us feel sick. Liz and I are so sleepy from last night’s debauchery that as soon as the guns are fired and the depth-charges exploded, the multiple pom-poms aimed and the air-targets missed, we return to our beds and sleep for two hours. O, I’m ashamed to think of the cost and the energy and the work of 150 men, robbing the taxpayer to amuse two women who could hardly keep awake.

  The next evening the barometer-chart shows a horrible V. They say that the thing has gone wrong, but I am sure it is a typhoon-warning. This gloomy augury produces a laugh, but I laugh last. Chaos and Cape Wrath have come again! Conrad can never never know what it was like. No John Julius to fear for, thank God, and my only duty is to Liz, whom I visit twice on all fours and find pretty well, drugged with sea-sickness remedies and resigned. Nothing can be done about Mogs, who is a prisoner in her cabin, all its furniture (cupboards and bureau) having broken loose and piled itself into a barricade. Even Duff is past his usual storm-crossness and will send word to the Captain that there is no need to stick to schedule-time, little realising that we hove to long before. The little ship’s beams can’t take the battering, I know that. Water is everywhere, tearing down the passages, bearing the ship’s treasure to and fro—silver candlesticks and (O! bad omen) the bugle. I look like a Dalmatian dog because my bureau has also broken loose and covered me with ink. I am on my knees as usual, praying without knowing how to make myself heard. The ship seems without a crew. No sailor or steward is seen or heard above the roar of waves and shivering of timbers. I look through the porthole once, and see mad milk boiling over and no sky. I bang the shutter with a vow not to look again. Lead, Kindly Light (written in a storm) brought the ship in. I try to say it.

  At noon it eases imperceptibly and allows George Gage to put his endearing face through my open door. He is like a star, smiling and with the terrifying story (that he thinks funny) of our Admiral sitting forlorn but taut in his cabin, while laid out on his bed, like a boiled shirt before dinner, is his life-jacket. Of our escorting cruisers only one remains. The other is standing by a ship in distress miles back. At 4 the Captain sends word that the storm is over. Prayers are answered. From death to life for me, but the ship is still cavorting maniacally.

  Valetta in view, the most beautiful town in the Mediterranean after Venice. They cheer us into port. We (or rather I) have not exaggerated the dangers, and they tell us that the anemometer broke in a 105 m.p.h. gale. London and Devonshire both lost their aircraft.

  The diary ends on this sensational note, and there is no record of our disembarkation at Naples, nor of how Mussolini put his private railway-coach, made up with bedrooms, baths, kitchen and staff, at Duff’s disposal to take his party to the English Channel, nor is there any description of its saloon, emblazoned with a sheep-and-goat list of pro-and anti-sanctioners, Great Britain being the leading goat.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Fog of Peace

  DUFF’S nostalgia for the Army and its frustrations was being swept away by ocean and enthusiasm for the Senior Service. The Royal Navy, the pride of the Island and England’s spoilt darling, was at this time (with black war looming) having its expansion thwarted by insane economies. Since the Coronation Mr Chamberlain had been in office. His relationship with Duff, never too happy, had not prevented the Prime Minister from promoting him to the Admiralty, and never was there a First Lord more determined to make a success of his appointment and to wipe out the impression of failure that his bare eighteen months at the War Office might have given. Duff’s ambition for the highest office having faded, his desire now was to give all he had of imagination, strength and fight to the Navy’s glory and aggrandisement, and after fulfilment to retire, aged hardly more than fifty, to an untrammelled life of writing and other activities. Leisure too he yearned for. This happy calculation had not reckoned with Mr Chamberlain and the drama of Munich.

  There was patient and persevering work to be done, and for me a lot of entertaining of friends and foes. The German foe Ribbentrop was the Ambassador in London. We saw him too often. He was a suave man who had learnt a few languages to smooth his way. He had a certain elegance and a considerable power of irritating everyone by punctuating his platitudes with references to the Führer. Emerald Cunard was the best of his baiters. “Tell me, dear Ambassador,” she would say, “what does Herr Hitler truly think about God?” The Führer had not yet determined what teaching was best for his people; it was one of the many subjects under consideration. Or again she would ask: “We all want to know, dearest Excellency, why does Herr Hitler dislike the Jews?” He was greatly at a loss for replies. I remember his leaving one particular luncheon, kissing the shrinking hands of the ladies, and as the door shut out his departure Winston and Duff and some other patriots dancing and shouting with glee at having been sent so despicable a German Ambassador. He entertained all London at a reception at his atrociously decorated Embassy in Carlton House Terrace. I took my mother, who, pointing at an heroic-sized bust of Hitler, whispered to Ribbentrop as he bade her goodbye: “You know I can’t help rather admiring him. Please don’t tell Diana.”

  Ribbentrop’s post was next filled by a dear old career-diplomat called Dirksen. I engaged a conjuror to amuse him and his wife when they dined with us. It was an enormous success. Conjurors always are with Germans, as indeed they are with me. I remember that before the first war the Lichnowskys hired a really clumsy conjuror from Harrods to divert the Dukes and Ministers after a banquet. The English yawned, while the Germans gaped at the wonder of it. Princess Lichnowsky was much loved in England. She was a Bavarian and an artist. Once she asked me to pose for her in the nude. I was very young and thought that it would be frumpish to refuse, so I stripped. She took a reel of photographs and never got to the easel. When the war came and the Ambassador left in tears, surrounded by the tearful, I wondered to what use that reel might be put. None, I resolved.

  Dirksen had something innocent and likeable, with no ray of humour to light him through the diplomatic morass designed by Hitler and tangled by Ribbentrop. I told him how much his predecessor had been disliked and why, and what not to do. He thanked me profusely for the information and advice. He was impressed by Admiralty House and its dolphins, and with the scallop-shell Wedgwood dinner-service that I had bought. “I collect fish these days,” I babbled, “shells and Neptunes and mermaids on dolphins’ backs. I am developing a fish complex.” Lightly said, but his poor face looked heavy with anxiety and sympathy: “Zo, you say you have a feesh-complex?” I shuddered at what
I was heading for, and hoped that he would not report my failing to the Wilhelmstrasse.

  This winter was to bring me and my family anxiety, death and sorrow. My mother since her widowhood had been living happily enough, pleased with the rebuilding of Chapel Street. In the big rooms she was able to give exhibitions of her drawings and of the pictures of others. For the first time she showed to the public her monument of Haddon, my little brother. Severe critics were moved to write eulogies about her academic chef-d’œuvre. T. W. Earp wrote: “In its tender gravity the modelling of the recumbent figure takes a foremost place among the statues of children in European art.” She showed me an old letter from Cecil Rhodes. I have it still. On seeing the effigy, he wrote: “I thought no man could suffer as I did about the Raid. I thought it was the biggest suffering ever meted out to man, but this beats it all.”

  The news that her son’s monument had been accepted by the Tate Gallery sustained and fortified her against injurious age. For ten years she had been victim to attacks never precisely diagnosed. She resigned herself courageously enough to a yearly bout of pain, fever and sickness that would possess her for a few days only. She had no wish to die. Her faith was childlike but very individual. The thought of death she tried to banish. There was still so much to be drawn and painted and built and put in order before she left us all. She feared too for the lame ducks (queues of them) that would fall without her, and she sighed for two of her grandchildren whose unborn children she could not hope to see. We never knew her age. I only once heard her refer to being old as “the time when one has a sentence hanging over one.” She found comfort in being almost sure that, dead, she would command greater power and judgment and capacity for helping her favourites, and that her lost son would rejoice at her return.