Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  I tried to remember things that the Prime Minister said that would interest you, but my brain is like a sieve and I can only think of one thing which I thought very touching and disclaiming of his power. When I said that the best thing he had done was to give the people courage, he said: “I never gave them courage; I was able to focus theirs.” He also talks glibly of the war in 1943 and 1944, which causes me to tingle with terror and tedium. We had two lovely films after dinner and there were several short reels from Papa’s Ministry. Winston managed to cry through all of them, including the comedy.

  I carry a dowser’s twig that guides me to a Folly. I remember stumbling with high-heeled shoes through a pathless wood in Victor Rothschild’s park at Tring, catching in brambles, sinking into sloughs and suddenly coming upon a disused avenue with at one end a crumbling, classical, pedimented house submerged in umbrageous and dripping trees, at the other an obelisk. When I found it by chance that memorable day, my heart leapt and visions of what it could be filled my eyes and thoughts. Duff and I could commute from this sanctuary. I would find work in Tring, cook and keep a few animals, a hive of bees and a vegetable patch. Victor would surely put it in order, for historically it asked to be preserved. He would let it to me, and I would furnish the three rooms. The idea obsessed me for a time. Victor listened and smiled, teased and cat-and-moused me, but finally agreed to grounding my folly-in-the-air. My passionate prayer answered, I planned the minutest details of good sense, beauty, war-duties, drains and vegetable plots. Then something went wrong. Victor could not have known what a bitter dispossession it was (on a par with Eden), but its loss bred a new fancy in my heart and head. Why should not our Bognor cottage become an eccentric farm of bees, goats, hares and guinea-pigs? The seed once sown grew apace and by the end of February it looked likely to produce a good sensible harvest of bread-and-butter and brioches.

  I wrote to Conrad:

  If the folly fizzles out we shall try to commute from Bognor. I’d have to farm a bit. Could I keep hens, a cow, utility rabbits and get goats in for cheese? Could I feed a couple of piglets on refuse? Why not on whey? An expert here says: “Folding units for fowls induce cannibalism.” Is one to believe that? Would you spend a night and most of two days a week with me once I am at Bognor? If only invasion doesn’t interrupt us!

  London

  3 March

  It’s almost settled. For Easter Papa and I will be at Bognor, I hope. I went down yesterday for a few hours accompanied by Wadey. We borrowed a utility van and piled it high with all we have got here, plus stores, gramophones, radios, saucepans, books, pictures etc. and bumped down on wooden seats to the little house. There is a gun and strong-point at the gate by the wood. There is another at Barrack Lane corner, and all the prom is dense with wire and concrete. No getting through any of our back gates. Sentries armed cap-à-pie walk up and down. The same thing goes on as far as the eye can see. I’ve sold Dodgems. I’m quite unhappy to let it go. I gave £22 a year ago. It’s had a gruelling time and I’m getting £35 for it. Not bad! I wanted to buy a small van so as to be able to cart myself, my swill, goats, swarms of bees, fowl-pests and pigs-in-pokes, but vans are as rare as radium and cost as much, so I’ve bought a boring 1935 Vauxhall. It has cost £85 and if the war goes on, as it must for a year at least, I shall sell it for double if I’m still kicking.

  Papa says that he is tired, a thing I’ve never heard him say before. He sometimes used to say, with a view to upsetting me: “Ich bin so müde, Weibchen,” which is what the Prince Consort said to Queen Victoria when he began to die, but the way he says it now wrings me. I hate it. I wish, I wish I could see you. Send me all the snapshots you can of yourself, or I may not recognise you, darling, darling.

  20 March

  My London Dorchester sojourn has two weeks at most to run. Then for the beaches! Meanwhile it’s preparations. I’ve bought two expensive bee-hives, a butter-churn and four goats. I study the West Sussex Gazette for advertisements of sales of farm-implements. I read leaflets from the Ministry of Agriculture about all the awful things that can happen to livestock—mastitis for the cow, red mite for the hens, Isle of Wight disease for the bees. Nothing can happen to the scapegoats on their blasted briared waste-land; they are pagans and worse than devil’s cattle. A lady in Bagshot is going to teach me to milk them, and then with the trailer I’m buying to replace Dodgems I should be able to transport pigs, bee-hives, garbage and even people on mattresses if necessary. We’ve got no money at all but that matters least. Always remember that, poor pauper. You are good and sweet and write lovely letters often, and I am indeed a lucky mother to have so grand a son. Don’t be influenced by people in bad ways. Don’t do things I should think common or mean, underhand or cruel, because it’s easier or because someone else does them. Be like Papa in courage and straightness, and don’t forget to love me.

  * Gentlemen, when escorting ladies out to dinner on dark nights, would pull out the tails of their shirts and walk before to show the way. So says Mr Kilvert, who wrote his diary in the 1870’s.

  * John Julius’s name for my mother.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Good Earth

  DUFF was exhausted and unhappy. He felt himself impotent and frustrated. “Frustrated” was the current word, and it was surely coined in the M.O.I. The Ministry was the butt of the Civil Servants and the Press. Duff was unused to the feeling of defeat. His successor, Brendan Bracken, alone was successful in this office, for he had the ears, eyes and heart of the Prime Minister, whose love of that dear and remarkable red-headed man caused Winston to give him unfailing support and attention. In Duff’s day Winston thought propaganda of no importance, because it would not win the war. It bored him.

  Since, in April 1941, no dissolving of cloud lightened his darkness, and conscious that resignation should not be an action of convenience, Duff agreed half-heartedly to live in our coastland cottage and commute to London. I was hilariously happy. I longed to get away to the green fields, nightingales and lambs. The Folly’s loss was forgotten, for now, occupied by Hutchie’s son Jeremy and his wife Peggy Ashcroft, it no longer beckoned, pleading emptiness and neglect. A year’s tension and the clashing and pounding of city life, at all times wearing even without the addition of high explosive, had brought me to a state of sluggish dejection. Now I felt as full of spirit as the month of May. It was exciting to leave the stalwart bulwark of the Dorchester and settle on the Bognor beach regardless of invasion. Lethargy, I knew, would float away like gossamer. Wadey and a gardener and his wife were to run our lives and the lives of a dense concentration of animals. The unheated little house, because of its small rooms, could be stoked up to fever-point. Half of it could be closed. Refugees still groused in the lodge. Holbrook’s unaccommodating pomposity no longer there, his cramped built-out bed-pantry should be my dairy. I had my car. I should be lonely at first, but the Gothic Farmer would put in two days a week and teach me to make cheese and to clean sties. June would be twilit at midnight because of double summer-time. The birds would sing me encouragement and the grass invite my flocks to graze; the bus would come to the door at the convenient time. The war itself looked less disastrous. Money was short (another reason for leaving the luxurious hotel) and so was material for what was to be my profession. I wrote to John Julius:

  Bognor

  April 1941

  Papa commutes. He likes it very much and he catches the 7.45 train in the morning and gets back at eight or nine according to how busy he is. I like being in the country a hundred times better than in London, but I miss you, my darling. On Sundays we go over to Bosham and have lunch at the Ship Inn Club. The water laps the houses at high tide and there’s a little bar after your own heart. When I was younger than you the theory was that the best sunbonnets were made at Bosham, and also that King Canute’s daughter was buried in the church. Off Selsey there is a cathedral under the sea. It once stood on dry land but the sea claimed it. They say that on rough nights you can hear the bells pealing.

/>   Bognor

  8 April

  Darling Conrad, the next Tag dawns. There will be exciting arrangements to be made. Buy pullets Monday. Could you try and stay two nights, as I think Duff will not be able to come back ever on Tuesday on account of late Cabinets? Gardener Jones has already built me an outside fireplace on which to bubble my trouble for the piggy wigs. Collect me any utensils you can. If you hear of a second-hand henhouse for twelve, buy it. They should be going cheap, as many people are killing off. Cream-skimmers and hobnails for my clogs are out for the duration. Butter muslin can only be sold in squares for fear we cheat and dress in it. Sweet farmer, help me with my farm! Help me until it hurts, as Willkie says. I’m sure you will.

  There is no such pamphlet as 325 Manual of Cheeses with Improvised Utensils. The Ministry of Agriculture disclaim it. They have sent me No. 122 Smallholder Cheese. I sent for dozens more manuals on fowl-pox, fowl-pest, white diarrhœa in chicks and many other fascinating subjects. Far from improvised utensils my pamphlet tells me to get quickly a table six feet by two-and-a-half feet with raised sides and ends, lined with tin sheeting. For a coffin?

  10 April

  Darling John Julius, I have to do all the marketing as there is no more delivering. I enjoy it enormously, not that there is any choosing and no pinching of chickens’ breasts, no picking out brown eggs or settling which biscuits to buy. You just take what you are given and like it, but there’s the big excitement of suddenly seeing a bunch of leeks or some mushrooms and falling (no, pouncing) on the find. Mr Parfrement sold me his old henhouse for thirty shillings and said: “I hope you’ll give me all the patronage you can. I can supply any fish you want as well as meat and poultry.” “I always do,” I said. “I noticed you had a parcel from Ragler’s in your car,” he said. I went as scarlet as a turkey cock and mumbled something about it not happening again.

  Goats evade me; they are unprocurable. I’ve telephoned all over the country to famous herds and scoured every village and farm in Sussex. Mrs Owen, the goat-wife, has two milky animals and I go daily to practise my hand at “stripping” the udders. I can do it quite well now, but I feel I’ll never get goats. There was quite a struggle to find laying pullets, but by dint of walking into every farm between here and Chichester, I bought six from a very eccentric farmer. He complained of being half-asleep and he wouldn’t give me any guarantee that the hens would lay eggs. I liked his lack of salesmanship, so the next day I went to collect them. He complained again of my having woken him and we popped the panic-stricken six into my shut car. They were fluttering all round me as I drove home, clucking and making messes and obstructing the view of the road, but an egg was laid in the car and three more appeared in the egg-nests before night. Wadey and I were thrilled. I collect pails of disgusting scraps from neighbouring houses, boil them and then with my hand break the pulp up small and mix it with rationed meal. They gobble up the muck and it’s a great pleasure, as we had only three old foreign eggs the first week. When Conrad brings me another six hens I hope to have eighty eggs a week and sell them easily. The pigs are being bought before I write again.

  18 April

  I’m still delighting in the novelty of farming. The goats still eluding me, I have settled to buy a cow, also four piglets called the Hutchinson Family, expected tomorrow. I spent a happy afternoon with Conrad fertilising the field with ammonia phosphate, so that it should grow richer and greener for my milk to be more plentiful for my cheeses. The whey will fatten my four little pigs. They are to be crammed into the goathouse and have a pen round them and never be allowed to take an unnecessary step, for fear of losing an ounce of weight. Yesterday I went to Bosham for my bees, to be told by the bee-man that they too were unobtainable. Everyone is going in for bees and goats, and I had been thinking how clever I was to cultivate stock that no one else would be likely to want! Then six more laying pullets arrived at the station in a crate, and I went to pick them and Papa up at 8 p.m. I packed them into the dickey and Papa into the seat, and looking at my petrol-gauge was horrified to see that the tank was almost dry. I knew that the only garage was shut and so we had to risk it, Papa in an agony of sweat and fuss. Of course it gave out a little short of the house, and I had to break it to Papa that it meant carrying a crate of hens as well as walking home. He took it with a pretty good grace, and off he staggered. The crate was tolerably heavy and covered with sticking-out nails. An army lorry came blustering towards us, so I hailed it, which made Papa scream with shame and put the hens down, so I told him to leave it to me and walk on, which he was not at all loath to do. I asked the young soldiers to give me a drop of petrol to get me and my birds home. They said they were sorry they couldn’t. I said that I’d give them a coupon. They said no, it was strictly against the law. I said that they couldn’t leave a lady in distress and that I’d have to leave the car in the road with its lights on all night, blocking the way if there was an invasion. They said they agreed and that they’d break the law if I gave them a tin, and had I got a rubber tube? I gave them the tin and told them that I didn’t happen to have a rubber tube on me. They backed their tank into a side-lane and fiddled for a few minutes and started to come back by the ditch like people ambushing. At that moment an officer passed leisurely on a push-bike. On seeing him they both lay flat on their stomachs concealing the give-away red tin. He looked round but, thank God, didn’t stop, and they hurled the tin into my window and tore back to the lorry, and were off in a flash. I was saved and after putting the juice in and struggling to get the crate in, I arrived triumphant with the car and fowls, so now we’ve got twelve birds laying eight or nine eggs a day. I sell them to the people who give me their shell-egg coupons and their scraps, which encourages them to eat less so as to get more eggs.

  We had a nasty raid after the dreadful London one. I was all alone, as Papa stayed up that night. Conrad was here. The noise of planes and distant guns and occasional thumps was kept up all evening from nine onwards. At ten we went and looked out of the best-bedroom windows towards Portsmouth. It was as bright as day with what are called “chandeliers” (clusters of incandescent lights that the Germans drop to illuminate their targets) and a steady white-green brilliance that came from I couldn’t make out where. I hated looking but Wadey can’t keep away from goofing through the windows. We went down and collected Conrad for comfort, and about an hour later there was a new succession of noises which we thought were incendiaries in the garden. We put the lights out and went to see. As I opened the window-door an appalling crash, which was a land-mine at Aldwick, tore the shutter out of my hands. The lights then were as violent at Bognor as they had been at Portsmouth. I couldn’t manage to fasten the shutter; the black-out being then incomplete we had to sit on the hearthrug and go on with The Times crossword by the light of the fire and one candle. I did not fancy going to bed.

  Yesterday came Hutchie, fat and funny. Hilaire Belloc came for a night. He is frightfully decrepit, poor old saint, moves as slowly as a tortoise and is covered with gravy, ash and candle-grease. He can’t move or get up without some support, and so always carries a very frayed umbrella about with him. It looks so strange indoors. Noël Coward also came down, fresh from America on his way to lecture for the Red Cross in Australia.

  I’m too busy to write. I’ve taken on more than I can manage and worse is to come. Yesterday I bought a seven-year-old cow for £27. She is called Eighteen or the Princess. She is ugly and tame and heavily laden with milk. I was out collecting my swill when she arrived, but I met the men coming back who told me that she would be sad and dejected for a day or two. Indeed she looked it, but I stroked her and gave her some dairy cubes, and was happy to find that she didn’t mind my handling her, as I had imagined insuperable difficulties when I came to milk her. I put a big nail into the tree-trunk near the little gate that leads into the field, and also a large hook at the height of my knee with a little pail hung on it full of meal. Then, armed with a halter to drag her by, and a sponge to mop her udder, and my fine new
pail that can’t be knocked over because it weighs a ton, and into which a hoof can’t get because the opening is so askew, and my milking-stool, I set off to milk. Nothing would move her from her disconsolate position by the fence, so I gave in to her whim and milked her there with speed and success. She gave over a gallon and a half, and it only took me twenty minutes. Hutchie watched and scoffed a bit. Papa arrived and helped me feed the pigs. All the farmer’s daughter has come out in Wadey. She is most keen and helpful and works hard too.

  The war was obsessing me less and I was learning to like solitude in restricted bouts. Making the smallholder cheese was the greatest of the new miracles. Life on a farm is miraculous, as is all life and death, but the joy through surprise of the transubstantiation of milk into cheese quite transported me into nature-mysticism. My utensils were improvised all right; one galvanised tub within its larger counterpart, a few six-pound perforated cheese-moulds, two Mexican double saddle-bags, gaudy with tinsel, filled to unliftableness with Bognor shingle, which when piled on the mould pressed the desirable trickle of whey from the curd. These and a bottle of rennet and a thermometer could make all kinds of cheese. A cow can inundate a small family with milk, and from one widowed cow’s cruse came twenty pounds of cheese a week, a pound or two of butter, plentiful sweet milk for my refugees and ourselves, and enough whey to fatten potential porkers. I loved my cow as the Russian peasant (I suppose) did before her cow was communal. She represented to me life, riches, sweetness and warmth. Dressed as Babushka, I would go, lantern in hand, through the half-light of spring with the birds’ first chorus to enliven me from bleary sleep, straightening up under my inevitable yoke that suspended the queer milk-pail and another pail of dairy cubes. The flickering oil-lamp I would light and hang on a hook in the dark shed while this beneficent beast welcomed me with her soft moo that ejected breath like a dragon’s. I would find her ointments and washing-cloths, and there I would sit for twenty minutes or so, my cheek deep in her furry flank, her sweet-smelling warmth enveloping me in content. Conrad, if he was there, would keep me company in cape and fore-and-aft hat, and Desmond MacCarthy I remember once telling me entrancing stories of his adolescence, stories that only the dark, the cow’s breath and the strange pure atmosphere allowed him to tell. The twenty minutes lengthened into an hour while the warm milk cooled. I would stagger back under my yoke to the dairy and pour the rich foaming gallons into their appointed tub, skim yesterday’s yield, put the kettles on and start miracle-making.