Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  The case ought never to have been brought. Englishmen don’t like these underhand, spying, jesuitical, nosey-parker methods. Really we might be living under the Star Chamber. Is it for this that Pym and Hampden suffered? That must be your line. Plead Not Guilty. Ask for costs. Say your day’s farming has suffered from this most ill-judged action taking up hours of your valuable time—and the still more valuable time of our respected Justices.

  I duly appeared in Court, anxiety well camouflaged by the Mexican hat and dung-laden clogs. I stood my trial and got off—I forget how. Could I have been bound over? I know that the fact that Lady Curzon of Kedleston had been caught burning her crusts and that Lady Woolton, wife of the Minister of Food, was said to have done the same in her bedroom rather than risk prison-bars by its being found in her ash-can, helped my defence. The case was withdrawn in October, leaving me without stain, to enjoy the radiant afterglow of summer, walking along the Arun river waist-high in meadowsweet to Arundel below Amberley’s white cliff and the beech-crested Downs. The farm was an undreamt-of solace. I thought I had found an activity that would, as the hymns say, “never cloy.” And so I had for war-days, but in peace-time with Plenty cheap in the markets, brought in choice to your door, I feared the incentive must go.

  Maurice Baring was lying at Beaufort Castle, never to recover; and in the winter of 1942–43 Enid Jones and I went up in dark, unheated trains, to see him for the last time. Though he did not die till December 1945, we knew we should neither of us ever see him again. What an awful finality in saying “I shall never see him again” of someone so near to one’s heart and still alive and alert. Maurice was playful all his life and to the end—playful as snow, weightless as it dances down, white on a dark background of cloud. Newman said “there were angels in disguise;” some get canonised, some, like Maurice, don’t. The budgerigar Dempsey still sat on his shoulder, chirping sweet nothings, the indefatigable nurse still dedicated her soothing gestures and words, her life itself, to his service. He was in a centre of the Faith he proclaimed, yet leaving him was so dreadfully sad that one wished he would soon win his last battle.

  So ended 1942.

  Emerald Cunard had arrived back before the New Year and had installed herself on the seventh floor of the Dorchester. She had been desperately unhappy in America, a country she had left in youth before it had recognised her remarkable worth, and to which she had returned (for reasons of sentiment) with reluctance and a certain hostility. Her relationship with her closest friend was foundering. The wreck was to be total, and I had had the saddest of reports from the English in New York of her dejected state. She had all but broken her last link with a past love and had succeeded in flying home via Lisbon.

  There were great rejoicings on the seventh floor, by none more than me, since I had a curious protective feeling for this little creature whom I had known since I was fifteen, when she was still a young woman. Emerald was like a jewelled bird uncaged, perched on ormolu; hardly cut and glittering, one could not imagine her in skies or branches. She belonged to the salon. Her song was of wisdom and wit and love, sung with a lark’s abandon and exuberance. For someone so rich in gifts and imagination she was extraordinarily unegotistical; she never referred to her own childhood or earliest youth in California but would tell you all about it if asked.

  She had been crossed in love when very young. He was a cultivated Polish Count who had taught her the way to learn, and had encouraged her reading of the classics. She had married Sir Bache Cunard without more love than esteem breeds, and had lived for years in a historically famous house in a hunting county. Her choice of a husband, I’m sure, was directed (or rather misdirected) by a newly-broken heart, and no blind bargain could have suited her less. He was a goldsmith by hobby and, honouring her, would fashion leaves and laurel wreaths and a garden gate with—inevitably—the words “Come into the garden, Maud,” wrought into its design (Maud was her real name). She despised it all as she did the wearisome society of “sports.” Sir Bache was an M.F.H.

  After her daughter Nancy’s birth she must have gradually emancipated herself from those Leicestershire confines, to surround herself for the rest of her life with artists, writers, statesmen, wits, beautiful women and youths of promise. She had the dowser’s gift for finding water and brought into my life many a rising man who might have blushed unseen in longer apprenticeship. Paddy Leigh Fermor was still almost blushing when I met him at Emerald’s table, since when I mean never to lose the floodlight of his heart and mind.

  Emerald had the hopping gait of a bird as she moved, a little restlessly, from perch to perch. You wanted to lure her to your hand, but she kept herself clear of human touch. Her hands were elegant little claws, her legs and feet of the slimmest and most shapely workmanship. There was nothing rushed about her modelling; everything was as finished as biscuit de Sèvres. Her skin and bosom were of the whitest, finest pâte. To my eyes she had scarcely changed in twenty-five years. The colours were the same, the outlines remained. A few wrinkles made little difference to the prettiness that lay in widely set eyes, shining healthy teeth and infectious animation. She forced people to live and give and ask for more of the elixir she had distilled and was proffering.

  Now in her war-time suite—one low, large room and a bedroom furnished a little à la bergère—she lived until she died in 1948. Not many years—only five—but rather happy ones. Most of her money had been dissipated in the cause of love and music and charity, and although she never said so, her possessions were slowly going to the sale-rooms to pay for her lavish entertaining. She spent little on her clothes, which were off the peg and never quite reflected her personality; her linen and scents and slippers and tortoiseshell and crystal were more illustrative of her tastes.

  She had always lived in large Mayfair houses of the kind that no longer exist—houses in Grosvenor Square, Carlton House Terrace, and, once during the first war, in a beautiful eighteenth-century house in Cavendish Square with its staircase painted by Thornhill; generally they were stereotyped London houses, accepted as such and rarely redecorated. Her hotel salon was densely packed with valuable French furniture brought, it seemed at random, out of store. One’s eyes boggled at the assortment—the ad lib eclecticism, the un-proportion, the mixed Louis’s, the Buhl marriage-coffers on stands, the busts by Houdon and Mestrovic, the welter of velvet and gilt, the objets de virtu and the pièces bought in the fortuned days and chosen not by herself, who had not a collector’s eye, but by the eyes and assessment of good advisers and nefarious friends and dealers, from the proffering hands of indigent artists or the houses of friends on the rocks; for, if Emerald caught me or my kind forgoing a treat for economy’s sake, she would casually call, pretend to fancy a picture or a table or a rug and insist on buying it for double its worth. One’s eyes, as I said, boggled at the agglomeration, and yet it did not disturb. It was so funny and characteristic of Emerald, of Emerald adapted.

  This winter of 1942–43 (we must have gone back to the Dorchester for a month or two) I did some part-time work, but what I can’t remember. There are no letters to help me; Conrad was up and down to London, Duff by my side, John Julius at school. Duff and I had from his birth, on which day the practice was to put a boy’s name down for Eton, looked forward to the old school revisited—the Fourth of June, strawberries and cream, one’s own flannelled cricketer to be watched and prayed for from beneath the shade of elms; ices, hampers of cakes and cold salmon and walks with intimate talks through fields where Waterloo was won. War-time’s hammer hit those hopes on the head. Duff never had the day off; this winter I would go alone, standing up in a crowded, unheated train. John Julius would be waiting for me in his outgrown, second-hand, threadbare Eton clothes with blue hands and grinning pink face. He would ask me to come in trousers, which seemed very unusual; but he was never convention-ridden, and I suppose he liked to see me as he knew me. It was alarmingly cold. In his scrubby little room there was no fire and no comfort of any kind; even sweets were rationed; s
o I came empty-handed. We would walk up and down that High Street till I knew every article that hung or stood in the shop-windows. Luncheon at Miss Masters’s restaurant was a bright spot, and the long afternoon we would spend mostly at the Art School because it had a minimum of heating. The journey home again, standing up in the corridor, was blacked out and took for ever. Spring made the visits a little less austere. We both rather hated games, so we still walked the unaltered High Street and dawdled at lunch to pass the time. By summer I was too busy ever to leave the farm, except for the Fourth of June, when it poured with malevolent relentlessness the livelong day—no fireworks because of Jerry and alas, no sisters in floppy hats, no swamping of boats, no nothing. The dear boy was doing very well under the tutelage of J. S. Herbert, whom I had come to like very much in spite of my shyness with masters, and the following year he was made an Oppidan Scholar. Duff and I preened ourselves in pride.

  I seem to remember we dined most nights with Emerald and the politicians, the writers, the Foreign Office, the free-lances and the Free French in the shape of Eve Curie, Gaston Palewski, Guy de Rothschild and Michel Saint-Denis. Other nights Emerald would go to the theatre, half-empty because of air-raid menace. But Emerald had no physical fear of the blitz, or of anything except the police. Some Irish atavism in her blood made her tremble at the thought of the police, but bombs she defied, and she never believed they worried other people. She would say in good faith when the apprehensive sought shelter “It’s quite different for me, you see, as I don’t sleep anyway.” She read all night and never forgot what she had read. Alone in the small hours, between classical and current readings she would disentangle the welter of the morrow’s twenty guests culled at random for dinner or the opera, and in her mind place them in her own unconventional conjunctions. Her mind was, when not inspired by fancy, serviceable and orderly. Her erudition perpetually surprised scholars and ignorants alike; she would come out with some obscure fact in the life of Apollonius Rhodius (“he was an African, you know”) or refer en passant to the Spintri that swam for his delectation between Tiberius’s legs. She called Lady Colefax and Mrs Greville (both hostesses of note) “the Dioscuri of gloom” and could quote with a feathery touch a chorus-ending from Euripides.

  She loved me dearly for my mother’s sake; my mother befriended and admired her from the earliest Maud days. And she adored Duff and spoilt him in a thousand delightful ways. George Moore, whose Grace and Muse she had been, bequeathed her a few very fine Impressionist pictures, which at her death were divided among her daughter Nancy, Sir Robert Abdy and me.

  In earliest March I again restocked my farm and settled down for the third time to rusticity, to the same absorbing life of labour, while Duff commuted and Conrad came weekly. Ambition grew; increase was all-important. Mushrooms were tried, and proved my only hundred-per-cent failure. Cheeses, now that the threat of invasion had lessened, changed their austerity into frivolity. I got the recipes of Coulommiers and Pont l’Evèque among others and made experiments in temperatures and maturities; England’s capricious cold-snaps and heat-waves precluded successes (and failures) on a big scale. I told the bees the news and prospects as usual, for this is as traditional a law in the apian world as is the banging of frying-pans when you follow your emigrating swarm, thus proclaiming that the buzzing treasure is yours and not your neighbour’s, and I told them this season to work overtime to make me mead in September. (Duly made and bottled—ambrosial but lacking authority.) I began to worry about Conrad. Hard work was killing him—the patrolling all night, ploughing and penning sheep all day, drenched to the skin (“the rain went into my neck and ran out of my boots”) was too hard a tax on his age.

  I’m wearied ploughing up grass, the nicest form of ploughing. It tires one’s arms more than one’s legs. Virgil says “Nudus ara,” which means “Plough naked.” Triptolemus is the name of the man who invented ploughing. It was a remarkable thing to think of.

  21 March

  I listened to Winston, but post-war schemes don’t take my fancy a lot as I shall soon be dead, almost certainly without posterity. He seemed to imply that lazy people, including pub-crawlers, would not be tolerated in the brave new world. But he didn’t say how they would be stopped. By imprisonment? I’ve read David in the Sunday Times—a mistake, because snippets always are a mistake. It’s very good indeed. What a poetical man Duff is! The most poetical man I know. I wonder if the Germans will hear about it. They’ll be more certain now than ever that Duff is really a Jew. Maurice is a poet. He is a lovable man. Would you agree he has a vein of silliness which you and I lack from not being poets? No, no—Duff is a poet and certainly is not silly at all.

  2 April

  My drake (he has four duck wives) is absolutely dithering for love of a large speckledy hen and pursues her ceaselessly, covering her with kisses which she simply hates. He goes to all lengths and never once looks at the thirty other hens. The men have never heard of such a thing before, which must be characterised as unnatural.

  Grief, as regular as winter, came this March in a severe, gnarling way. The last time I had seen my cherished Kat Kommer, in 1941 on Long Island, a quarrel—something said, something done—clouded our leave-taking. It had not haunted me; I felt safe in my devotion to him and I am not much troubled by remorse (without which penance the God-fearing tell me one may not hope for salvation). I had written him a rough letter that ended with loved-though-worn jokes and thanks and decorations galore for all he had done for John Julius and for me.

  When Duff told me of his death I remembered this last wrangle; but there was so much more to regret than one of many such. He had dropped dead. His heart had stopped as he had been warned it would, while reaching for a book in the Ambassador Hotel, New York.

  His wide quantity of friends, in many capitals and countries, were shocked and sad according to the quality of their relationship with this unique genius from Czernowitz. Iris Tree, his “doll,” his “derelict” of Miracle days, wrote his funeral oration, which was recited in the synagogue to a multitude of devotees assembled there to honour him. Of the many sad I am sure I was the saddest. Duff said how glad Kaetchen would be, did he know of the bitter tears I shed, and the darkness of the cloud I walked under.

  April

  Darling Conrad, I am quite quite down. I wish the God of Kaetchen’s fathers would wipe the tears for ever from my eyes. Why do we always write in quotations and talk in them? Its eroticism—no, do I mean esotericism?—must irritate others.

  Material things were tightening up in England but doom was relaxing its vice upon us. Rations were shorter; such noxious meat-alternatives as whale and snoek were fobbed off upon the patriotic. Clothes had become a struggle and were mostly second-hand. American friends sent stockings and nightgowns. Petrol-allowances were decreasing. Forms, controlling milk, shell eggs, poultry and pigs’ balancing meal, coupons lost and found and exchanged and illegally black-marketed, cluttered our pockets and became a whole-time nightmare. The swill, once mine for the taking, now was processed and mass-produced. But somehow we carried on, with better hopes ahead. Conrad wrote:

  13 May

  We had a really nice day with things growing and house-martins coming back to their nests. I thought I should never see those elegant birds again. Bognor went in a flash. I never in my life knew time to go quite as fast, and a man’s life is but to say “one.”

  The stallion was due to call to see if Kitty was enceinte. He always calls again, free of charge, three weeks after to see if all is well. But he never came. Forgot, I suppose. The carter is sure Kitty isn’t horsing.

  Katharine got a note from her Aunt Muriel saying she must see her urgently. K. hurried round and then her aunt asked her to pray for the conversion of the Jews. Katharine said she would.

  I’ve finished Chris Hollis’s book. In it he says once more that you’ve only got to think of the men who don’t go to church and you’ll notice they are a degraded type. I think he means me.

  What a triumph for L
ord Grantley to be made co-respondent at the age of 87. I wish there were more like him. Indeed I wish I was more like him myself.

  27 May

  The stallion remembered and called. It seems he calls every three weeks just to see if everything is all right and carries on so all summer. An attentive lover, and all for three guineas.

  I travelled with a clergyman and he talked of the Battle of Ethandun, fought 878 A.D. If it is his regular conversational opening he can’t often find anyone as interested as I am and able to keep the ball rolling.

  Changed times. I asked Mrs H. my neighbour if she minded her three children aged twelve, nine and six standing in the farmyard to watch the bull servicing my cow. She seemed surprised that I should ask. No, not the slightest objection to it, and “Straw” (the one aged six) helped the men haul out a calf from its mother’s womb one day when I was away. No more storks and gooseberry bushes.

  This coming winter I resolved to remain under the live-stock’s yoke. We ate so well that friends wallowed and felt refreshed after two days of cream and chickens; there were still more good lobsters in Bognor seas than had ever come out of them. John Julius was with us for the summer holidays, and the dark clouds of disastrous news that we were used to had a play of light upon them. One evening after dinner came into our blacked-out cottage a blazing Very-light. Freda Dudley Ward on the telephone told us Mussolini had fallen. “The beginning of the end,” “half-way home,” we said, exaggerating from joy.