Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  Darling J.J., Conrad came down and together we made a cheese of cow’s milk. It’s a fascinating occupation, and takes hours of standing with your arms deeply plunged into ever-warming curds-and-whey. As it’s winter-cold I’m grateful for the warmth. There’s a lot of temperature-ing of the heating water and stirring the milk. Rennet is administered in drops at the proper degree and within a few minutes you notice bubbles rising on the glassy surface. You trouble the surface ever more gently until these same bubbles show obstinacy, then refusal to burst. Stop! The transubstantiation is there and the curd separates from the whey. When this occurs, you take a stiletto-ish knife, and slice and slice the substance while it slowly heats. When it is cooked, granulated and drained, you press it into moulds and press weights upon it. The moulds have holes in them and out trickles the whey.

  Ever since my possession of Princess I have felt I cannot be complete without a cow. I had one called Fatima in Algiers and I have one today in France. Princess was a constant trouble before she got too attached to me, her mistress-calf, to want to escape. How often in that first spring would I come to her with pail and stool under arm, beneath some radiant morning’s stainless sky, larks exulting above, a warm sun already up and white hoar-frost underfoot, and find her vanished, the gardener already out in pursuit, the refugees barricaded in for fear of her being at large. Cows find it hard to hide, and I would generally find her at her old dairy-yard, knee-deep in valuable rationed cowfeed, gorging herself to the horns. I would fling a rope over her dear silly head and she would trot home by my side, more agile than I who stumbled along in huge rubber boots as unsuitable for a walk as were my nightcap and greasy face, so that I dreaded being seen by some early-rising acquaintance. The Princess, having no boots, once off the rope would evade me again.

  Bognor

  4 May

  Darling John Julius, what shall I do when the goats arrive, which they will do this coming week? Mr Simon Marks of Marks & Spencer found them for me at last—a pedigree one costing 25 guineas which he is giving me, and a good one costing £6 which I am buying. I didn’t dare take a peep into the gift-goat’s mouth, so didn’t ask if they were horned or unhorned. All the whey and buttermilk go to the pigs which have cost me £9.10.0 and which I shall sell again in three months for (I hope) about £40. The goats I shall keep and the Joneses can live on their milk and butter during the winter. The pedigree one can have a kid next spring. The chickens will be eaten when they stop laying. It seems to me that if one doesn’t pay labour and doesn’t get swine-fever, foot-and-mouth or white diarrhœa, if one scrounges and gets scraps, one is bound to live like an emperor and make a profit.

  The evacuees never leave the lodge. I see their dough-coloured faces glued to the windows. I suppose it’s the livestock that scares the parents.

  13 May

  I write so seldom because my time is filled. A goat arrived. Conrad and I went to the station to meet it. Emaciated and terrified it was, with a gnawed cord about its poor throat. We lifted it into the car. All our stock travel like the gentry in a limousine. When I got it out at the stables it gave a sudden spasmodic dash, backed by supergoatian strength, freed itself from my nervous grasp and ran like a satanic symbol across the garden, over the barricades and into the barbed wire of the defences. I (with the menace of mines in my mind) pursued it into the wire and rescued it whole but with its udder lacerated and bleeding. I sent at once for the vet, who pronounced it only superficial, but agreed that milking was impossible. He produced a tiny hollow bodkin which he proceeded to put into the minute orifice through which the milk is squeezed, and let the liquid flow through it into a jug. He told me that I must do the same for a few days, which order paralysed me with fear of bungling the operation. However I succeeded pretty well. It’s better now and the syringe is put away, but it’s still a job that needs a lot of patience and is not really worth the time that Jones and I give to it. He has to hold her head and because it’s so cold I still wear the fur jacket, and either she thinks I’m a billy-goat or she just hates me anyway, but she is always trying to give me a vicious bite over her shoulder. The ribald soldiers leaning on the gate roar with laughter when the cloven hooves leap and upset me and the milk. The milk is delicious, unrecognisable from the best cow’s milk, and it’s dreadful for the Joneses and the evacuees to have to admit that it’s good, and admit it they have to, for fear I shall give them two separate glasses of each kind and challenge them to say which is “musty,” which is what they want it to be. The Joneses have been awfully clever in saying that it’s only when it’s cooked that it’s musty, but I’ll fool them yet.

  The Pig Family Hutchinson is in splendid fatness and should make me a nice profit and the country some fine bacon. I spend a lot of time asphyxiated by the smell and bent double inside the sty shovelling out their dung, and a lot more time boiling up the swill, which makes my mouth water. The hens are Wadey’s pride and joy. One (our favourite, Sussex by name) has gone broody, which means that a mother’s instinct for children quite overcomes a bird and as she no sooner lays an egg than we greedies grab it, she gets to a stage of sitting on nothing, hoping to hatch out imaginary eggs and laying none. The thing to do then is to buy her thirteen fertile eggs and let her hatch them out. I did this, and in three weeks hope to have a covey of fluffy yellow chicks.

  The success of all successes is the old Princess. She has settled down, crops the buttercups and stands quietly to be milked, tied slackly to the garden gate. She gives me between four and five gallons a day, which makes good durable hard cheese that really will help the country’s food in a minute way. I tasted the first one yesterday, made in early April, and I do not think it could have been better or more professional. If all goes well I shall write to the papers and do a broadcast at the end of the season demonstrating what can be done with one acre and a bit of hard work by hundreds of old maids and little families who have got £50 for the initial outlay. But the English are set in their ways, and if they haven’t done a thing before they don’t fancy it now. They will do anything dangerous. They’ll fire-fight and become men and women of warlike action, but gentle agricultural arts have no glamour unless one is born and bred to it. To me it is enthralling. The rotation is fascinating, drawing life out of the rich earth, and that life returning its wealth to the soil by its manure, and the dovetailing of things. The pigs make the field produce more grass, the cow gives more milk in consequence and therefore more whey, which the pigs lap up, and they fatten and manure the field again. You couldn’t call me a drone or a lily of the field that toils not, neither spins. I wish I knew more.

  For all this activity and happiness (yes, real happiness) in absorption and obsession for the good brown earth, Conrad was to be thanked. He never failed me through this glorious summer, though his own work was hard enough and his Home Guard duties disturbed his nights. Only one night a week he spent at Bognor, and with it two days of labour. In the evening we would eat our recherché meal over the fire in the early spring, with a bottle of Algerian wine, Bognor lobsters and vegetables from the cabbage-patch. He would read Trollope or Jane Austen aloud, while I sewed the cheeses into their muslin binders. As summer waxed we would eat outside to the sound of the waves on the beach, unapproachable now, on the other side of the barbed wire and concrete blocks through which the tamarisk forced its feathery pink.

  In the first days of April I had seen in a friend’s courtyard the ideal small trailer and was told that it belonged to Gerry Koch, who to our sorrow was a prisoner of war. I felt certain that he would want me to use it, so I promptly appropriated the treasure. In the trailer three times a week I would pack ash-cans and make a round of houses, hotels and camps, leaving an empty can in exchange for one brimful of beautiful swill. A friendly baker would give me loaves of stale bread. With these I could keep more hens than the rations for twelve only (issued by law to domestic poultry-keepers) would allow.

  In June when haymaking was before us we attached to the little trailer two great chintz (im
provised indeed!) horizontal sails (Chinese paravanes they were called) for loading. Off we would motor to the paddocks, tennis-courts and odd patches where hay cut by the owners would be given to us gratefully for the riddance. This way, working until 11.30 p.m. in a Lapland light, we built a neat little stack, big enough for the cow’s winter feed. I would stand on the rising heap while Conrad fed me with swathes. Over all we put a scrounged waterproof sheet and, exultantly tired, ate our Swedish supper at midnight. Conrad wrote in June:

  Going to bed dead-beat. I think being with you at Bognor in hot June weather is as near Paradise as I shall be allowed to come. One has no right to expect Paradise in this vale of sweat and grunts and bearing fardels. Mrs James came in as if it was a tragedy and said: “I don’t know what to give you for dinner. I’ve only got sausages and boiled beef.” To which I might answer: “I’ve also got three-quarters of a ton of cheese, thirty dozen pickled eggs, three dozen newlaid ones, twenty gallons of fresh milk, potatoes, onions, salad and cabbage ad lib.”

  Christopher Hollis and I hold the watch tonight. My offer to resign my rifle to a younger man is refused, and my offer to resign my Corporal’s stripe is also refused. I must be on my guard against ambition; by that sin fell the angels. Have you heard that Lord Hardwicke met his wife leading her cow? He had a squirt in his hand so in a waggish mood he discharged it full in the cow’s face. The cow whipped round, knocking Lady Hardwicke arse over tip, and disappeared at a gallop. Now it won’t let Lady H milk it any more and its whole temper is altered. Her Ladyship is in a rage with her husband, not unnaturally.

  I wrote to John Julius:

  I’m so much happier here at Bognor. I must have been more acutely unhappy at the Dorchester than I realised. The roses are on the verge of blooming, the irises and poppies in flower; buttercups and daisies mask the green fields; the Spitfires and Hurricanes whizz by in the high empyrean, a misty silver formation that from the garden does not look hell-bent.

  The Khaki Campbells by my side are preening themselves and making Donald Duck noises. They have no water to swim in, just a basin in which to submerge their heads. It is out of farm fashion to give ducks swimming-space, and yet they have to keep those awful feet. It seems dreadfully cruel, like taking us off the snows but leaving our skis on. It’s the first summer day, the first without frost at night. Jones has brought the hammock out, and Conrad and I will rock in it this afternoon and look at the roses bursting hurriedly into bloom and watch the bees making up for lost time. I have two hives now. Did I tell you of acting as assistant to the bee-fancier at Bognor, Colonel Watson, when he came to open and examine my colonies? I had a veil over my face and elastic bands round my wrists, but I forgot my trouser-legs like chimneys. I thought I felt lots of bees crawling up them and attributed the sensation to my imagination, well-known for its activity where horror is concerned. I didn’t dare complain to the old Colonel, so I carried on until I was stung in the thigh. I didn’t even mind that, but it made it clear that imagination was not all the trouble. So calmly and slowly (for one must do nothing spasmodic or hurried where bees are concerned) I took off my trousers and stood exposed in ridiculous pants, pink as flesh. Looking, I found the trousers lined with bees. It was a Charlie Chaplin scene.

  Conrad wrote in early July:

  Everything I do with you is always amusing, always just the things I like best, like feeding pigs, paper-hanging, reading about jealousy, picking nettles, making cheese, fetching swill and dabbling about in hogwash.

  We came through Southampton, which is terribly knocked about. There was an airman in my carriage who told me that he had had five homes destroyed in Portsmouth and all his furniture lost each time. Eleven near-relations had been killed. His wife and two children were evacuated to Petersfield, but a land-mine hit the house. As “she’s taken nervous” she went back to Portsmouth. The next time Jerry came he (the husband on leave) sat under the kitchen table with his wife and two children and she was delivered under the table. She was in labour one-and-a-half hours, no doctor and the house all fallen about their ears. The baby is alive and “a nice little chap.” The man had had eight days’ leave.

  Do you remember to ted the hay?

  I wrote to John Julius:

  Bognor

  16 July

  I’m very very fond of you and today it seems a possibility that I may see you before I dared to hope. The Ministry of Information has become well-nigh impossible. It has no powers at all and all the blame. Papa, while thinking it wrong to resign on discontent or pride alone, is far from happy with his position. Today in the papers are rumours of the changes (1) Papa to be Postmaster-General, (2) Brendan to succeed Papa, (3) Papa to be given a post abroad. The first two are absolutely groundless. Papa couldn’t even be offered the Postmaster-Generalship; it would be infra dig. But the third report has some foundations and it might mean adventure and travel, and even seeing my darling son again. I saw you last in a dim station a hundred years ago.

  Meanwhile I try not to think about it, but keep my mind rustic and turn my hay until 11 p.m. Incidentally my hay has no fellows. Last night Conrad and I stayed in the fields until 11.30 and in the almost-dark tried to get the six pigs from the pen to the sty. Three we styed, three we let evade us. Once out these fat little white congested indolences become energetic liberated young wild boar, and O the hunting and stalking, the struggling and sweating! It ended (just before I passed out) by my grabbing them one by one by the back legs and wheel-barrowing them to the sty, to the accompaniment of such blood-curdling yells and shrieks that I felt all Sussex must wake to the din and brand me an animal-torturer. The Princess has paid a visit to her bull bridegroom. I took her to the tryst. I was less embarrassed than I should have been; bold as brass I was. She was a reluctant bride (her eighth wedding) and bored with the whole performance. It took place, me at the other end of her halter, before most of the licentious Canadian soldiery, cracking their ribs with laughter. All over very quickly, and I led her away with disdain for their ribaldry. We shall hope for a calf next March. Meanwhile if I am transported to another continent, who will tend my Princess? Where are my Moths and Mustardseeds, Cobwebs and fairy monsieurs all? Who will stroke her ears and burnish her silken flanks and talk to her in her own voice (moovoice) as I do?

  Aunt Marjorie and Caroline have been staying. It was such a treat. In the war one meets so seldom and Marjorie is such fun. She looks most peculiar, emaciatedly thin, with hair that is neither white nor brown nor pink but a weaving of all three, withal looking very old and suddenly baby-young (no, monkey-young). Caroline was a dream of physical beauty, long classic legs, brief modern pants, Garibaldi shirt, her beautiful sulky yet smiling face very small in a Zulu shock of hair. I am so used to my own appalling appearance, masked with dung and dressed in drab, that these beautiful creatures from their worlds of youth and age left me in middle-aged wonderment.

  Spirits exult lately. The Russian fight, the waning of German confidence, the respite of bolts from our blue, the vigour of our bolts from their day-and-night blue. These things have buoyed us considerably, but the longest day is past and the dread of winter is on your poor mother for one. Still who knows that it may not be spent here, and who knows that I may not see my dearest dearest child, if only en passant? Keep well, keep good, keep loving, keep truthful, keep brave, keep laughing.

  I remember the night in July, me at my most bucolic and contented, when Duff arrived with news so dire that he found difficulty in delivering himself of the whole trust. As usual I found myself less shattered than I might have been. The news that we were to start as soon as possible for Singapore was very dread. This flourishing green isle in the wide sea of misery was to be submerged. The slogans had persuaded me that I was digging and milking, churning and reaping for victory, and that it all “depended on me.” Now I was asked to take my cowardice into the element that most I feared—the cruel sky. I had been ridiculously happy with the farm. Nature’s beauty had ceased to jar upon me, as it had done for two
years. Now this content must have a stop. Alternatives arm one. Imagine staying behind. Waiting for news, hearing of the crash or the imprisonment and not being part of it. Then I had Duff’s exuberance to protect, at first a little dimmed by causing me qualms and, those dealt with, his relieved spirit would soar and exult, for at last he would be delivered from a long pain. There was very little time, two weeks perhaps, to pack up for the adventure. Conrad would be sad, and I would be the cause.

  In Winston Churchill’s story of the war he writes:

  Nevertheless the confidence which we felt about Home Defence did not extend to the Far East should Japan make war upon us. These anxieties also disturbed Sir John Dill. I retained the impression that Singapore had priority in his mind over Cairo. This was indeed a tragic issue, like having to choose whether your son or your daughter should be killed. For my part I did not believe that anything that might happen in Malaya could amount to a fifth part of the loss of Egypt, the Suez Canal, and the Middle East. I would not tolerate the idea of abandoning the struggle for Egypt, and was resigned to pay whatever forfeits were exacted in Malaya. This view also was shared by my colleagues.