Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  Her last attack was severe and she seemed too weakened to survive. My sisters were away, but my brother John was a help as the sad days dragged on, getting new opinions and accustoming me to the inevitable. She was operated on, and never again was she her sensible self. She lay singing snatches of old songs like Ophelia, and describing in some new-given idiom, strange and beautiful, the things that passed before her half-blind eyes. She died three days before Christmas 1937. My brother and I were with her at 34 Chapel Street, the house that she had re-created for me, while at Belvoir the whole family were assembling for their yearly jubilation. John was sure of what he meant to do. That her death should cast clouds over the Castle Christmas would have enraged her, so she must be alive in all hearts until the festivities ended.

  I stayed with her who had once been my all-in-all, through this macabre holiday, warding off the inquisitive press, lying to anxious enquirers, trying to calm and silence the faithful maid and the rest of her people. She was buried at Belvoir. I did not follow her so far, but remained in London, greatly dejected. The press later excavated and exposed this story and hoped to scandalise its readers, but I think sincerely that the deceit was inspired by my mother, and that thus she would have ordered her end.

  To escape I took John Julius to the snows of Savoy, whence I wrote to Duff:

  Mégève

  11 January 1938

  The Victor Rothschilds are here to help me. Victor set Barbara, John Julius and me an examination paper (prepared with pains earlier) on mathematics. I had to leave out two subjects (multiplication in double-numbered sums, and all division), ten items in all, but I won! Barbara and John Julius tied! The Rothschildren seem fond of me. I grow on people, given time.

  I hope that a fortnight’s rest will put me into a calmer state—rest and hitching my star to “the wagon.” If I’m no better I’ll have to consult a doctor. It can’t go on like this. I’m not happy. How can I be happy? My poor Mummy, my poor Mummy! I shall get serener about it later. I’m more unhappy because I’m without you. You don’t know yourself how good you’ve been to me these sad days. None like you, none.

  And to Kaetchen:

  I have put off writing and thanking you for your sweet telegram and verse until I got free of England, so that I might have time and solitude to tell you a lot, and now I am so exhausted with letters that my pencil and mind both drag and stick. One is overwhelmed with condolence and the letters smother. I like it when people say the right things about my mother herself, but I can’t bear them inflicting me with my own grief. It sounds ungrateful, and curiously enough I go on answering them—strangers, friends, Mother’s friends, Mother’s crocks and crooks—and something forces me to write them all long letters. I would not see any of them although they went on clamouring, but I had and have my own way about sorrow—a way of effort not to groan and cry and do all the things that would have made her so frantically unhappy to be the cause of, but the friends who gather round the bereaved have a different idea.

  I think that my mother had a wonderful life. Death must be terrible, but she had a short illness, half of it semi-conscious and the other half unconscious. She had great fortune in life—energy, art, love, adored children and grandchildren and undiminished love from them to the end. Best of all she died before she saw them decay and die or meet with tragedies or break their hearts. The same applies to her grandchildren. What better future can one ask God to bestow on one’s child? I was there when she died, but she knew nothing and I felt calm and was surprised at my lack of hysteria. I saw her put in her coffin and I stayed in the house alone with her until they took her to Belvoir, and nothing seemed to shake me. But I would not go to Belvoir, and once all was finished and time told me that the grave’s door was closed, I got sad, sad, sad, and had to crush surging memories and heartrending sentiment. There are great terrors when one starts to think too. Her loneliness (perhaps) worries me.

  Meanwhile Kaetchen has his work cut out. So much must be settled. I have no decisive power for the moment. Chapel Street is mine, so is Gower Street, so is the Admiralty. No more money. In fact I do not think that there will be enough to cover the small bequests that she has made. I have not seen the Will but I know all this. Duff and I keep howling: “If only Kaetchen were here!” I think you’ll have to hurry and come home a little sooner this year. I feel a naked and lost child. I also feel as if I’d lost a child.

  Kaetchen returned, and his nervous hands re-arranged chaos into order. Gower Street must go to the highest bidder, and with it what I cherished most in bricks and mortar. The buyers dealt reverently with Rex Whistler’s decorations. The cracked Roman vase in its niche, the Roman plaques and prints of classical nymphs, hanging casually and not too flatly on the walls in trompe l’œil, are boarded over and can be salvaged yet.* The Chinese walls painted by my mother and me, with their birds and ghostly white trees, were obliterated by an hour’s whitewashing. They had served their purpose. The books had already come to Admiralty House. The pictures and furniture were all moved to Chapel Street, and to make room for them a sad sale of half my mother’s curious chattels was held in the orangery room and garden. She had herself organised a sale at Arlington Street before it closed its private doors, and now part of what she could not bear to sell must be bartered and forgotten. Rex Whistler must make the longest room, with its two galleries and six high windows, into a library. The design was drawn of globes and obelisks and draperies that were to surmount the high glazed lining of shelves, each section with a tablet announcing its literary subjects. All were cast and stood waiting. I wonder where they still wait.

  In the early spring Austria was ravished by Germany. Duff had had serious influenza that kept him from his work for nearly three weeks. The beasts being fought by him at the Treasury could pause and disarm for peace. A £6,000,000 reduction on ships was their aim, and Duff fretted in his fever-bed, fretted for the Navy, for Anthony Eden’s resignation and for the country’s probable defeat in war, while I fretted for his lungs and his relapses, and for the most perfect early spring crocuses and blackbirds in the Park and the pale sunshine that I had no heart to enjoy. I had grown very fond of Duff’s successor in the War Office, Leslie Hore-Belisha, and I would pester him with instructions to see that Duff was not in a draught during Cabinet hours (did he realise how feverish he still was?) and to remind him on leaving to put his muffler over his mouth. Leslie was sweetly patient with my hen-clucking. He lived with anxiety, as I did. Night and day the war-dread encompassed me.

  Duff could not absent himself from his work, so, when the King and Queen went to France in July 1938, I went alone with Liz Paget to revel in the triumphs of Paris. Our Enchantress took the King and Queen over the Channel. Liz and I, on the newish ferry-boat, were four hours late. At noon on 19 July I was writing:

  At the port

  We had a merry dinner with the Rothschildren and Winston and Venetia, Winston packed for the Ferry with bezique-cards in hand for plucking me. But a message came from the Chief Whip that trouble would be debated next day. Too disappointed to believe it, Winston tore round to the House, only to meet us again at Victoria with the news endorsed. He’ll start tomorrow night instead.

  Liz and I babbled until Folkestone, where the grinding and honking and pounding started. Half-sleep, for the desultory foghorn moaned all night, and wide awake at 6 to a sense of utter stillness and a sad absence of vibration. The fog had been so impenetrable that we hove-to twice. Will it lift for Majesty? What a fever our Peter Frend and his company will be in! Perhaps they’ll stop the other traffic and go all-out-blind.

  In the train

  The line has a soldier, armed cap-à-pie, my lord, from head to foot, posted every hundred yards. They stand in blood-red pools of poppies and seem to be advertising a second world war. It’s very exciting and I’m enjoying it immensely. If only my dear were with me.

  Paris

  We saw the King and Queen from a window, coming down the Champs Elysées with roofs, windows and pavemen
ts roaring exultantly, the Queen, a radiant Winterhalter, guarded by too many security measures. The Minister who was responsible for their safety told me that their fears and safeguards were such as to put a plain-clothes policeman in every window on the route and to have hefty citizens lean in a ring against the suspect trees lest they should fall on the procession.

  Each night’s flourish outdid the last. At the Opera we leant over the balustrade to see the Royal couple, shining with stars and diadem and the Légion d’Honneur proudly worn, walk up the marble stairs preceded by les chandeliers—two valets bearing twenty-branched candelabra of tall white candles. This custom seems to have died, for in 1957 no candles lit Queen Elizabeth to her Royal Box.

  The Elysée and the Quai d’Orsay outshone each other in splendour and divertissement. Malmaison, decked doubly with roses, received the Queen. It was here that I talked to two crying old ladies who begged for my place on the Royal path. “Vous la voyez toujours,” one said. “Si seulement nous avions un roi,” said the other. Monarchy dies slow in many French hearts. A cook-general at a friend’s house, serving a blanquette de veau, had said to me when the King was acclaimed earlier in the year: “Enfin, nous avons un roi!”

  The most beautiful of the fêtes was given at Versailles on a radiant summer’s day. The mist had not lifted when we arrived in the early morning to watch the review of troops and machines of war, so the fly-past of aeroplanes was postponed. We lunched in the Galerie des Glaces, with thirteen glasses apiece for the thirteen precious wines, all bottled on the birthdays of presidents and kings. The servants, in livery of the date with powdered hair (another ceremonial custom since shed), served the company feather-light delicacies in a single hour. Grace said, we walked in procession to the chapel galleries to look down on the members of the Comédie Française in clothes of the Great Century, sitting on ornate chairs, while some heavenly choir sang Monteverdi, and the Roi Soleil flooded the scene with dazzling shafts of light through the topless windows.

  A sinister reminder of reality clutched at all hearts, like a deathly hand, when the fog of peace dispersed. The aeroplanes of war shot noisily past, casting menacing shadows across the serenity of the service. Later, by the Bassin d’Apollon, we watched, from a grassy dell where shepherdesses tended their lambs beneath tall trees garlanded with roses, living nymphs dance round the stone horses of the Sun. Hysterical security measures faded away as day succeeded day, and on the last night the dancing people were allowed near and everywhere. Many times the King and Queen were summoned to the balconies by insistent clamouring. No one shouted quite as loud as Henry Bernstein and our group, who had left the great halls of the Quai d’Orsay in favour of the crowds below. I can never forget it. To the French the Royal Visit seemed a safeguard against the dreaded war. That at least is what they told me but I could see nothing to allay fears.

  * They were carefully removed and, under the supervision of the Slade School, re-erected round the walls of a small circular dining-room in University College, London.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Enchantress in the Baltic

  EARLY in August 1938 we set out on another cruise in the Enchantress, this time to the Baltic, taking Brendan Bracken with us. The rest of the party was unchanged. George and Imogen Gage and Liz Paget had proved themselves the perfect shipmates. We met at Portsmouth in the festivities of Navy Week. We watched from a green Admiralty lawn a sham battle of appalling ferocity and thunder carried on overhead and all around, with planes falling, shrapnel bursting, anti-aircraft guns banging away, and conversation with Lord and Lady Cork and Orrery therefore quite impossible. I remember tedium and lots of tears for Nelson’s Victory and a few for the Queen Mary shimmering past like a ghost.

  Spirits were very high (Duff’s the highest) because of everything, plus the new superstructure Duff Cot. I wrote:

  Today most of us have slept half the day, some from liver, some from exhaustion. The ship is full of the Royal crossing to France. The Queen had nobbled everyone, naturally, from the Commander-in-Chief to the marine who always occupies on all fours the bathroom. The First Lieutenant, Mr Costobadie, is like the ailing Knight at Arms. I doubt his being able to cast it off. The King forgot his hotwater bottle and a frenzied message preceded their arrival telling the ship to provide one. A child was despatched to Boot’s Cash Chemists on a bicycle before it was realised that he would never edge his way back through the crowds and the guards, but the clever Puck got back in forty seconds. He should get a medal, and so should our smashing Captain who only got two photographs.

  Next day I was woken by the crashing, pounding, dragging, shouting, grinding and gnashing which precedes picking up one shabby little pilot, and by guns firing from ship and shore. We found ourselves in a peaceful sleepy lock, the entrance to the Kiel Canal. There a suspiciously-looked-at German officer came aboard, with epaulettes and a suitcase that terrified us with its long-stay look. I wrote to Conrad:

  His conversation ran entirely on how much percentage of ground is covered in London with buildings from a bombing point of view. He was surprised and no doubt disappointed to hear only seven per cent. He was on the Deutschland when it was bombed the other day by the Government in Spain and he gave a good description in technical English. He is quite nice, but I never forget for a minute the dead and those to die.

  At Kiel two Admirals came to pay their respects in pidgin English and we respected them back in pigdin German. Also came the English Naval Attaché, Admiral Troubridge, whose beat is the Baltic. His father was the Admiral who wasn’t (I repeat wasn’t) to blame for the Goeben evading us. He looks all I like—light in spite of bulk, beautiful and smiling. He will add a lot to our cruise.

  We all got into three shut motorcars, together with the Liaison Officer and his unilingual Frau, and drove for an hour to an inn where we were warned that the “midgets” might be troublesome. They stayed their stings, but we weren’t warned that the choice of food was jellied eels or smoked eels, or of the drink—a much-extolled spécialité, “light, very light beer mit etwas darin.” They would not divulge the etwas. I guessed optimistically (being in Baltic waters) that it was aquavit but it proved to be raspberry syrup. We sat and sat over our eels until the “midgets” came in force, while Tommy Troubridge talked loudly about the procession down the Champs Elysées. I could hear it, and so of course could my Hun neighbour, so I paused to listen, thinking it referred to the Royal visit. Not at all! It was soon clear that it was the Victory Parade of 1919 that he was describing. The Boche guns, he said, had been stacked up in a heap like so many matches.

  “You scribe in your day-book, ja?” the Frau-Liaison has just said to me. I’m on a particularly unattractive beach. Some are trying to sleep it off (the ones who were not in on the eels and raspberry beer) and Liz is having a kümmel with the Enchantress boys. The day started early. We went (the Quality, some new nobs and an impressive wreath of English roses and oak leaves) to the local Admiral’s minute yacht. Five old German wives came along. We were in smart rig, stockings, hats, gloves, badges, caps, etc. We came to a magnificent War Memorial on the sea’s verge. I was moved by it, but even more by seeing my poor Duff looking for all the world like a man on his way to execution. He was walking in front of us, head down, the picture of dejection, in “civvies,” two strong uniformed giants on each side and his wreath borne by two others in front of him. A band played a dirge and muffled drums shuddered as we walked down the dimly-lit tunnel that led to the mortuary. There the wreath was laid while the strains of “Ich hat einen Kamerad” came from the upper sunlit air. Why do French and Germans like introducing sinister morbidity into their memorials? The Romans didn’t, did they? Our cemeteries are like gardens, brilliant and serious. I remember in a French war ossuaire seeing notices that read: “Silence. Do not disturb the dead.”

  Well, we came out of the tomb and found a fascinating working model of the Battle of Jutland, which we all studied. Does anything like what goes on in my head go on in theirs at such moments?
I doubt it. They love the subject of war and talk of casualties with the pride that “sides” have in “scores.”

  Lunch was at their Admiralty House between Admiral Albrecht and Admiral Carl. I did my best and so did they with our maimed tongues. I shall face the same flanking tonight at Enchantress’s dinner. After the Admirals had shown us their pictures, all of them subjects of defeat (the sinking of the Breslau etc.) they drove us for an hour and a half very fast to this ghastly beach, rather like Pagham, although there appeared to be many charming deserted bays quite near Kiel. Germans are bunglers au fond, thank God.

  8 August

  Enchantress’s dinner went all right. I found that my untaught German couldn’t explain the Gents and Ladies situation. I took the ladies one by one, but they each said: “Schön, sehr schön” instead of “Thanks” or “No thanks.” The Chief Admiral spoke for his colleagues the decisive words “We don’t want …”

  No doubt our ideas about foreign countries are as naive as foreigners’ are about ours, but this seems very surprising. The Admiral, praising what Hitler has done and wishing for my sympathy in his plight, said: “It is difficult for you Engleesh to understand the straits of a country that must rely on its harvest. In a bad year our people starve.” I told him that we never had a good year. Our people would be dead if we relied on a harvest. “Ach, but you have Canada.” I said that we had to pay for Canadian corn, and that meat was cheaper to buy from the Argentine than from Australia, and often corn too (for all I know this may be true), but I could see that his view was unshaken. If one had colonies one took free what was needed. Another said to Duff: “I suppose you always take your vacation in your colonies?” Duff had to propose the health of Hitler. It all but choked him. The German proposed the King. I drank one in water, one in wine.