Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  I wrote to Kaetchen on 23 September:

  Darling Kat, You little know what you say when you tell me to write for the papers. I am not, as you know, made of the stuff Londoners are made of. My instinct is to flee. I cannot report on scenes in shelters. There are hundreds of keen, nerveless people out all night pursuing fires and demolishment. But for you I will tell of a day in London last week, when my canteen closed for a term.

  At about 7 a.m. the first siren would start up. Wade would be calling us with the tea and very bleary eyes, and I would have been asleep for an hour after coming up from the depths. The odds are that I would be too exhausted to care, and that the All Clear would go an hour later. Sometimes I feel that it is madness to remain on our roof floor, but I know it is useless to shift Duff away from his shaving, so I resign myself to sweat. At 8.45 Duff goes off to his Ministry. There, I know, he sits beneath a Selfridge-sized plate-glass window which will kill him if a bomb drops half a mile away. Is he better there? Or now, since the siren has gone again, is it worse to be in a car or already in the Cabinet which (if at Downing Street) is a target made of lath and plaster? He won’t carry a tin hat or gas-mask, so I have to see that both are in the Dorchester suite, the car and the M.O.I., but I can’t sneak one into the Cabinet Room.

  Meanwhile, apart from thoughts, civilised morning life goes on identically. The Times is there for one’s waking. Other papers are there by 8.30 or 9, letters a little later. The telephone buzzes on through the raids, with friends relating night-adventures and narrow shaves. I plod on with little zeal and little success to get internees liberated. I try the Office of Works to get Duff’s Ministry windows wired. I ring up Lord Moyne, Lord Camrose and all the rich I can think of to give me old mattresses, blankets and pillows for basement-shelters to house the workers. I get up wearily at last. The water is boiling, the sun always brilliant, service prompt as usual, messages, flowers from Moyses Stevens (now glassless but just as artistically decorated). I paint my face in the same way, dress as smartly (but against the grain) and buzz off to the Ritz for a drink with one or more of the boys. The Ritz is a little empty compared to the Dorchester. Conversation: bombs only. In the afternoon: more chores, Evening Standard, radio. The balloon-barrage turns from silver to gold, and at seven the black-out starts, the siren wails, and I wonder why Duff is not back and try not to telephone for news of him. Bath, evening clothes, for we semi-dress for dinner much more smartly than we would in days of peace. I have a serviceable get-up, black to the ground with a black lace top over pink and long sleeves with shoulder-puffs. We call it La Maison Tellier. I have too several diaphanous shirts worn with the same skirt and the saucy flowered crowns with veils (bought before Paris fell) to hide sad traces. Then down to the luxury-liner restaurant, reminiscent of S.S. Titanic, jam-packed now with passengers and crew that one knows too well. Dinner to the accompaniment of a band playing as loud as it can to drown the storm of the Hyde Park guns incessantly booming. At 11, a little lulled by Chianti but utterly unexhilarated, we walk down to the Turkish bath, stepping over hundreds of hotel-mates dossed down on mattresses, some with dogs that bark as you pass, some snoring, some reading with a torch. The Turkish bath is not so safe, as it’s not under the main building, but it has cubicle-privacy, a cot, blankets not sheets, a light apiece, and above all deadened noise. The passages in the middle floors are lined with sleepers, but our floor is, I think, deserted by all. I feel comparatively calm in my subterranean cubicle and sleep with the help of a pill. The cleaners arrive at dawn, and with the dawn the All Clear, so up one trudges to one’s proper bedroom and it all begins again.

  Still it is endurable and my greatest terror is being forced by Duff to leave the city. It is so utterly unlike what I imagined the raids on London would be. I thought of a bigger, suddener attack, with the whole population blocking the roads, Ministries evacuating to their pre-arranged dispersal-stations, frightful dislocation, worse perhaps but not so much worse than this cold-blooded waiting for destruction. Most people don’t see it so. They have confidence in a defence being found. “This is only a phase of the war. We’ll stick it out all right.” There is not a street that does not show some assault. The curtains flap dismally out of Londonderry House and most of the big Piccadilly houses. I try to avoid the places where the cruellest gashes have been inflicted, but one has to take the way that cut-off streets, encumbered with bombs ticking to explode, allow. Two Berkeley Square houses are non-existent except for one tall wall from which waves a long red stair-carpet like a banner. Our Ministry took it full in the middle of its high head but stood up to it. It’s the older houses that collapse completely. Queen Anne’s Mansions are cleft in twain. The Dorchester has had incendiaries on her deck, but Jim from the crow’s nest puts them out with sand, or has done until now, though he’s always on my floor-telephone saying how hot things are getting. I wouldn’t be a Jim Crow for a V.C. The wind has been blowing Armada-strength but has now dropped. Qui vivra verra. Dum spiro spero. I’ll close now with those two platitudes.

  I cannot have shown my true colours (chiefly yellow) and some wave of a panache must have been left, or Conrad would not have written:

  I think your spirits wonderful. Mine are awful. I wonder you can bear me, but you are always gay, witty and the life and soul. I know that it is done by an effort and as a duty. I’m lost in admiration and so totally unable to be as you are.

  Nor would I have written to Conrad had not Duff and I in our hearts been deeply dejected:

  Duff is anxious to live in the country, and so am I if we survive. He seems depressed. He thinks that Winston hates him now. He is both bored and worried and dislikes facing doom (who doesn’t). All these weaknesses are frighteningly unlike Mr C.

  1 October

  Darling J.J., All my supports are leaving. Jimmy Sheean has gone. H. G. Wells has flown to America. Knickerbocker and Somerset Maugham do the same tomorrow. Our first funk-hole, the Turkish bath, is said to be a death-trap, so we are in the reconstructed gymnasium. Eight nice Little Bears’ beds behind screens, all the camels, horses, bicycles and rowing-sculls removed, Unfortunately it has a hollow wood uncarpeted floor, three swing-doors with catches on them and the room is treated as a passage. I never get a wink, but Papa is the proverbial log. The second night a great improvement took place. We had sheets, a table and a lamp. No one else had a lamp. There was a carpet to muffle the many fewer footsteps. Conversations are conducted in whispers that take me straight back to childhood and to you—Sir George Clark asking Major Cazalet if he knows what the time is etc. No one snores. If Papa makes a sound I’m up in a flash to rearrange his position. Perhaps Lady Halifax is doing the same to His Lordship. Between 6 and 6.30 we start getting up one by one. We wait until they have all gone. They each have a flashlight to find their slippers with, and I see their monstrous forms projected caricatureishly on the ceiling magic-lanternwise. Lord Halifax is unmistakeable. We never actually meet. Sometimes the All Clear goes in the middle of the night and some idiots trudge to their upstairs beds and get comfy, only to be woken an hour later by the siren and down they have to trudge again. I wish, I wish it was all over—Hitler defeated, the lights up and the guns still.

  2 October

  Today we moved down to the fourth floor and I shall feel safer in the daytime and I shan’t hear our Jim Crow’s pitter-patter. At night I feel quite secure in the gym and sleep like a log. It’s certainly more pally in the Underground, where families go in about five p.m. with bedding, babies, buns, bottles, and settle down to community singing, gossip, making new friends, exchanging bomb-stories etc. I should rather like it, but can you imagine Papa’s reaction if he had to join the party?

  4 October

  I walk across the Park now at 6.45 past the Achilles statue. The railings are all down and the ground is deep in leaves that have fallen fast this year. Mr Coombs, Papa’s political agent, took me to see the ruins of Pimlico today and spared me nothing, I was happy to talk to the people and hear their stories and won
der at their serenity, and stand aghast at their sincere desire to stay in London and not be evacuated, but I didn’t see why I should have to look at the craters and ruins. Mr Coombs appeared to think that it was a treat, and probably you would have thought the same. The truth is that I don’t like realities, John Julius. I like dreams, shows, plans for the future, storybooks, music and jokes. Best of all though, I love you and Papa, and you are both realities, so my argument collapses.

  13 December

  In the midst of our uplift over the Italians fleeing in Greece came the news of Lord Lothian’s death. I’m ashamed to say that my second thought was: might Papa be given the job? What a vista of hope and light I floated down! I should (just to begin with) see you again as a bachelor and not as a man with a beard and family; I should come out of the darkness, out of the fear; the shame of leaving others to face what I was missing would be mitigated by being ordered away. I must not write of the hope nor think of it, as the odds are much against it. No use planning whether to take Wadey, or if I’d be well advised to take the old brown boots, or whether to have my hair permanently waved this side or that. Enough, enough!

  I wrote to Conrad:

  I am grief-stricken. Euan Wallace is dying. Alas, poor Captain! He led a happy, healthy, abstemious life. How little it pays! Take Lord Lothian. Orangeade and Christian Science quite vanquished him. An untimely end indeed. Perhaps Duff will be sent to Washington. I am torn by conflicting hopes. I’d like of course to see John Julius again before he’s married, and I think that Duff would do well and get the credit for the United States coming in, which I know they will do, but I should hate to desert you, to say nothing of the Fighting Temeraire England. I see that a name has been submitted. I hope it’s not a Munichois. Halifax would be branded an appeaser. Bobbety it would kill, and Betty is not the ideal, as she probably still sees them as rebels. I’ve suddenly thought of George Lloyd. He’s the Goschen—“I forgot Lloyd.” Winston loves him. He’s an Eastern expert, but we know East meets West.

  London

  20 December

  Darling J.J., I cried with laughter over Papa’s censored letter. It was like something you cut out for Christmas decoration. I never write to you without his telling me that my letters are unintelligible to a boy of eleven, or to an adult for that matter, indecipherable and censorable, so my triumph over him is complete. They seem to me to be as clear as a nursery rhyme, not that a nursery rhyme makes much sense, but one knows them since childhood and you’ve known me since childhood and before, so we must hope you like to get a bit of news from this dear island. Not that you can get much, for Papa tells me nothing. It’s been a grievance for twenty years.

  The proud city has had another easy week. The joy I should have taken in the relative calm was utterly marred by your dear Papa waking up on Wednesday, after a healthy dinner and good sleep, with a temperature of 103. You can imagine my fuss and to-do! I of course feared for his life, and also was greatly upset to think that he would miss the Christmas week at Ditchley, that we had greatly looked forward to as a restorative and delight. I thought of the weeks at the Admiralty when he had tossed with influenza-bronchitis from dolphin to dolphin, until my courage fainted. However, with intensive cosseting, two nurses, physicking, heating, sweating, cooling, plus a lot of praying and purging, we have thrown the germ off (I trust) in four days and we shall go to our Christmas on Sunday. One good service this disease has rendered to Papa is that it has kept us out of the gym, and I must steel myself after Christmas to sleep above ground.

  So Lord Halifax is to go to Washington instead of me. I suppose there will be a prejudice against him because he was a Munich man, but America will like him very much when they know him. He has infinite charm and his predecessor had a worse reputation for appeasement when he was made Ambassador, yet he made a very good name for himself and was much praised. His only fault was to let the Huns have all the propaganda in the United States to themselves.

  Ditchley

  22 December

  We’ve got here, thank God! You should have seen the party leaving the Dorchester—Wadey staggering under sordid paper-parcels, last-minute sponges, slippers poking out, two tin hats, two gas-masks, guns, ammunition, a white Christmas tree in a red box, another Ministry red box, big boxes, little boxes, fur gloves, a terribly intimate hot-water-bottle of a poisonous green, and Papa himself twice the size of M. Michelin, in two coats under his fur coat, a muffler round his throat, another over his head and ears, a hat on top of that and only one bright little blue eye goggling out.

  I wish he could have a real holiday. He has not had a week except for flu since France fell. He’s tired, poor boy. Winston never is, but he does all his work from bed and sleeps after lunch in pyjamas, works again from his bed, gets up for dinner and feels like a daisy at 2 a.m. when others are exhausted. Clemmie seems blissful. She can’t understand those who write from the United States in pitying vein. “Why are they sorry for us?” I quite see why they are. Clemmie, wife of the greatest of living men who finds himself beyond his life’s ambition and knows that he can save us and triumph, exults in his unswerving confidence and is less to be pitied than some poor gnomes whose husbands have thankless jobs that they hate, or whose sons are fated.

  3 February 1941

  I have asked Mr Wendell Willkie to dine with us. Will he, I wonder? I met him once. I shan’t know what to say because what will be on the tip of my tongue will be: “I’m so glad they didn’t elect you President.” It is great fun, though, hearing people’s impressions of London when they first arrive. They vary a great deal, some thinking it a complete ruin, others noticing nothing unusual, just depending of course on their characters (like you and me). You would never notice any disasters and I have double vision of them.

  You will be glad to hear that I have slept my last night in the gymnasium. Papa had one more. After Christmas I became resolved no longer to expose him to derision by dragging him underground. On a convulsive boisterous night, seeing my sufferings, he tried to drag me down, but I had learnt pride and would not now budge. He said that he would bolt down himself so as to lure me to comfort and sleep, and thus it ended with him down and me up.

  London was excited and electrified by the Wendell Willkie visit. He went down into the Underground at night and down like a dinner with the crowds. They shout and cheer and say: “Tell them we can take it!” and “Send us everything you can!” and this elephantine figure, with a painted-white tin helmet, seems to amuse and impress them. I gave a dinner-party for him (only ten of us) in a private room at the Dorchester. He had a gentleman along with him, whom we had stayed with in Minneapolis, called Mr Cowles, whom I also liked very much. Willkie was treated like a king and film-star rolled into one. The newspapers told us what he ate for breakfast and what size boots he wore. Now he has gone. I waved him goodbye last night and I pray God he will give a good account of us and our country, our needs and hopes, when he comes to testify to the Senate.

  It was at Ditchley that the Prime Minister used to spend full-moon week-ends. He travelled down to the house, one of the most beautiful in England, with his staff and detectives, his maps, intercoms and operators.

  19 February

  Great excitement last week-end! We went to Ditchley where Winston was staying. Golly, what a to-do! To start with, the Prime Minister has a guard of fully-equipped soldiers. Two sentries are at every door of the house to challenge you. I look very funny in the country these days, in brightly-coloured trousers, trapper’s fur jacket, Mexican boots and refugee headcloth, so that on leaving the house I grinned at the sentries and said: “You will know me all right when I come back.” However, when I did return the guard, I suppose, had been changed. I grinned at what I took to be the same two soldiers and prepared brazenly to pass, when I was confronted with two bayonets within an inch of my stomach. They no doubt thought that I was a mad German assassin out of a circus.

  Winston does nearly all his work from his bed. It keeps him rested and young, but on
e does not see so much of him as in the old Bognor days. There is also a new reverence for so great a leader, and that creates an atmosphere of slight embarrassment until late in the evening. Also instead of old friends the guests included people called D.M.O. and D.M.I. (Director of Military Operations and Director of Military Intelligence) and an enchanting king of the Air Force, Sir Charles Portal, with a wife whom I used to play with as a child because she lived at Denton near Belvoir. Brendan of course was there, and Venetia, also Winston’s wife and beautiful, animated daughter Mary.

  Then on Sunday a flood of Poles rushed in—President Sikorski, the Polish Ambassador and some other sledded Polacks. After lunch the little procession, headed by Winston, followed by the upstanding Poles and brought to a finish by your exceedingly reluctant and rather sleepy Papa, walked off to a private room for a conference on Polish publicity. It took an interminable time and when at last it ended and the Poles were due to move home, the Prime Minister suddenly thought that the President should have a guard of honour. Secretaries and A.D.C.’s went tearing round trying to find the Captain of the Guard, but he was sleeping or walking and could not be found, so Winston himself finally routed out some rather raw, inexperienced soldiers, who had never formed a guard of honour before. Meanwhile the patient Poles were sitting on the doorstep waiting for their guard to arrive, and the President said: “Mr Churchill is so great a man that we must let him do what amuses him.”