by Diana Cooper
The Aletti Hotel was a source of constant jokes. A large building on the quays, it had lost all the glass of its windows. Under the rank of a Minister or a Colonel you could not hope for a room to yourself. Above that rank you could only rely on one sheet for a chrysalis-wrapping.
When at last we had a car, Duff used to send me sometimes to pick up forgotten men from the Aletti and bring them up to our circle. The Peruvian Minister was my first charge. I was over an hour tracing him, knowing only his rank and not his name. He was found at last and brought out blinking like the lettres-de-cachet old men out of the Bastille when it fell. He had been there for weeks. His nice eyes brimmed with tears when he found me solicitous, for he was not accustomed to living in one room, with one used sheet, and no car with which to pay his protocol calls; he had lost prestige and hope. We gave him some gin and he stopped crying, and Madame Catroux, who had dropped in, was nice to him. He enjoyed himself until I had to take him back to his particular circle of hell.
I was very fond of Madame Catroux. She had twice the energy and public spirit of anyone else, which was irritating to many. She helped me out with my good works, such as they were, and we would gossip shockingly and exchange intimacies about cosmetics and our outmoded hats. The General was surprisingly like my Algerian gazelle.
Some evenings at dusk Duff and I walk round our Arabian property. It’s huge, beautiful, romantic, and the seasons will bring flowers and new fruits. The Civil Servants mooch round and tear branches off the mimosas. They get given a lovely tea, and it’s quite a success.
We have a Moorish lodge at our gates, as pretty as Scheherazade’s old home, romantic though dark. This also I am going to make over to the Civils, get some divans, get the R.M. to whitewash it, and fix it with curtains from my 100 white metres bought in Marrakesh (now said to be winding-sheet material, therefore controlled in price), stock it with periodicals, stationery, such books as I can find etc. It shall be my doll’s house and theirs. Great, great fun!
8 February
Wormwood’s day. He’s to dine here. Fourteen strong we are—the C.-in-C. (Jumbo to wit), Macmillan, Mrs Wormwood, the Laughing Cavalier Palewski, perhaps a shining F.O. light called Loxley and understrappers. One of our all-day problems was finding a topic for me and de Gaulle this evening. I asked all kinds and conditions; after a lot of head-scratching and vetoing of all subjects by an unsmiling Gaston Palewski we came to a dead end: “Enfance,” I suggested. It had never failed me over the years; as an equaliser it is second to none. “No, no!” they screamed. “L’enfance! Surtout pas!” Ancestry better. Let him trace himself back for you. Or what about escape in 1914–18. But Giraud has drugged the market with such stories, and I can’t manage my own genealogy, let alone Jeanne d’Arc collaterals. So childhood it shall be. I won’t try The Miracle; it is quite forgot and never heard of in France. When I say “Quand j’etais sur la scène” my listeners start involuntarily. They don’t pursue it, but I’m sure they make a mental note to check my naissance, wondering if they’ve got something wrong.
The Sergeant-Major had decorated a verdigrised candelabra of Arab design with roses and smilax up to the bobèches, so that the table laid for le Général de Gaulle looked like a constituency wedding. I couldn’t wound his pride by ripping the flowers off, so it stood, in its vulgarity, centre. The King’s glass and china and the hotel linen looked digne, and I had Jumbo Wilson on my left. I talked childhood with the General and also ancestors, and enfance went best, as it’s always bound to. Madame looked most worn, practically without any “résistance” poor creature, or make-up. After dinner he sat with Duff and was not very gracious or amenable. I don’t suppose that Boney was either.
Duff afterwards was much depressed about his French. He certainly is very silent in it; politeness flows, but not much wit. Should I find him a tutor, I wonder? I don’t believe in them much. It’s nerve and brass, audace and disrespect, and leaping-before-you-look and what-the-hellism that must be developed. My French, quite deplorable as it is, flows and flounders and gets there. It’s a steeplechase with gigantic obstacles, sometimes astonishingly cleared, and the courage is magnificent. Grand National! So that I’m surprised at my own reckless confidence.
On our rare free afternoons we explore the countryside and revisit Tipaza. At the foot of its own cloud-capped Olympus there juts the promontory, once a Roman town, its ruins still lying among absinthe herbs and rock-rose. There are caves and grottoes where the sirens sang and white foam tracing arabesques. Proteus probably lives there, his horn hung up. From the shore you can drive through ravines and vines and mountain ways to Le Tombeau de la Chrétienne. It was erected in A.D. 18 (such a nice date) and has nothing to do with any Christian. It dominates a wide country, is a big stone beehive with ruined facing of Roman pillars built in warm-tinted stone. Sepulchral chambers inside are shown to visitors by an old Arab with a lamp and a little Arab girl who darts through the chinks of stone like a lizard.
The Civil Servants are still a preoccupation. We thought some needed a club and I was taken yesterday to see a wrongly-situated English church library, but it has just been seized by the British Council to sing madrigals, dance folk-dances and act the “Screen Scene” for the purpose of showing Algerians the stuff we’re made of. As a rule I leave Freddie Fane to cope with our down-and-out personnel. Not as many fetch up as I hoped would. It’s a blow, as my scrounging Sergeant-Major has a sort of Gunter’s buffet of cakes and tarts. “Leave it to me. I’ll make it … pretty.” So encouraging he is. He stands to attention and says: “I shall be able to scrounge that, Your Excellency.”
Soon it would be spring. The wistaria buds were swelling grey. John Julius’s holidays would be in April. It was going to be difficult to get home because of priorities. Whitney Straight had the power and the promise to get me a flight, but without a permit I did not stand a chance. Tedder and Slessor had both been involved in our housing troubles and were not friendly enough to break the law for my ageing blue eyes. Someone said: “You ought to know Dawson, Dawson always flies.” I found him. He was well disposed. “Agnosco fratrem,” I thought, instantly recognising a brother in lawlessness. Permits for him were scraps of paper. All the aircraft in North Africa were his own, salvaged and repaired. He had two Liberators that he used for ferrying spare parts. Weather was as immaterial to him as permits, so he crashed into the Massif Central after the Liberation, killing himself and three friends of mine. His war-work, that of making old planes into new from Suez to Casablanca, was over, but he was still young and would have excelled in rebuilding the air-services for twenty more years.
My letters continued:
Brilliant blue windswept day. We had the Soviets to lunch. The Bogomolovs are the standing joke, interest, sneer (what you will) but always in the conversation. They arrived in the streamiest-lined shining car, dressed splendidly, she in a foul sulk, Bogo yellow as an egg. They had just returned from a flight into Egypt and three days in Cairo. I asked her if she had liked it. “No,” she said; “how could I? My husband too—he was souffrant d’ailleurs, il est toujours souffrant.” (Yellowness explained.) “What did you do or see?” “We had to see the Pyramids.” “Did they impress you?” “Non, mais je ne comprends pas comment on les a bâti.” She’s got something there! So it went on, though she admitted to having bought a lot. They have squandermania.
How I miss you, farmer! No one has asked me to be their Valentine. No hearts, no darts. God bless your crops.
Conrad wrote:
Windsor Castle
The separation is like carrying a basket of stones wherever one goes and it seems to press on my heart. You will be glad to see my address. We always use Royal stationery when we can. I am well lodged with Tommy Lascelles in the Tower, a real tower with spiral stairs and wonderful outlook. William of Wykeham built it and Chaucer lived in it. He was Clerk of the Works at Windsor, and only wrote verse in his spare time, like Duff and Vansittart. Tommy is a good guide. We see everything, even the most private an
d intimate nooks. The good pictures are all underground. He knows his way about, dates, historical events and where to see the different Royal ghosts. How lovely St George’s Chapel is! I said some prayers for you in the Rutland chapel. There’s a splendid monument of Lord Rutland and his wife. I should think earlier than the one who was or wasn’t Shakespeare, and do you know Princess Charlotte’s tomb with the angel and weeping woman, the work (Phoebus forgive me) of Herr Fuchs?
The carter told me about his early married life on 14/-a week. It sounds starvation at first, and then you find that he had all the butter he liked at 6d per lb. and all the whey-butter he liked for 4½d per lb., all the cheese he liked at 7d per lb. (N.B. the butter and cheese were made by Mr Osborne and would be better than what they have at Sandringham.) On Sundays they were given a bucketful of potatoes and very often one or two broccoli. They paid no rent; the corn they got gleaning supplied them with bread. And so on. The hours worked were long, but the food was much better than what they get now. I daresay 14/-didn’t leave much for clothes, but they didn’t have to pay £12 for a hat as you do.
When I did my Virgil I read: “Mens immota manet; lacrimae volvuntur inanes,” i.e. “He does not change his mind; his tears flow to no purpose.” How terribly they fit!
The carter says to me: “You’ll plough today. You can stick it better than I can.” Considering I pay him to be ploughman, this strikes me as a bit thick. As you can imagine, I am enormously flattered by the phrase “You can stick it better than I can,” especially as he’s a good bit younger than me. It certainly looks as if England was safe for democracy when that’s the way a ploughman talks to the master.
I wrote to Conrad:
17 March
Great, great larks! I’ve bought a cow. Fatima I’ve called her. She has not arrived yet. She is coming under her own milk and it’s a long walk from Dely Ibrahim, where I bought her, and when I say “bought” you can trust the old gold-digger not to have paid for anything.
The days are one lovelier than another, arums and freesias bursting into wild bloom in the garden and fields. I spent yesterday trying to get equipment for Fatima, and managed after walking actually miles through Army Ordnance stores to get four “dishes cooking tin meat mediums” for pouring the milk into, one “bucket tea tin large,” a plate of tin to have a cream-skimmer made from. They all have to be indented for and it may take days, and arrive after I’ve gone, which date depends on Dawson’s whim, as the C.-in-C. won’t give me a permit. I shall miss the galloping pageant of African spring but I’d rather see John Julius and you.
It won’t be long now. I’ve been vaccinated for Gibraltar’s sake. I shall be “freight.” Mosquito-nets and bathing-shorts to be found for Duff are still on my list, for it’s spring and every morning I pick armfuls of arum lilies and large bunches of freesias.
Dawson took me without permits on 29 March. There were five of us, all strangers and men only. My face must be cheerful. My pill taken, my two prayers said, I boarded the Liberator together with Air Commodore Sowrey and two jolly private soldiers with destination-labels flapping round their chins. I had flown only once alone, and I remember feeling like a bivalve without half my defence; besides, leaving Duff was always an isolation. I was lonely if he was an hour away. I was awakening too to the magic of Algiers in 1944. In spite of the two magnets in England, it was a wrench to leave the spring and the flowers, Freddie, the prisoners, and the valiant girls on their firing-line missions who swept through, the parachutists and resisters, in short the hub of the free world. The tendrils that were to become as strong as spiral bonds were beginning to twine round me.
We came down at Rabat, unintentionally, the airfield a patchwork of purple wildflowers, and again at Gibraltar with the same prognostication that we would be too big for the runway. There we were received by the A.O.C., Bill Elliot, with whom I immediately fell in love. He took me to his flowery garden; a heavenly terrace for drinks. Admiral Burrows came in from the Mount next door. The A.O.C. dreamy, humorous and probably highbrow, because the Admiral quoted Cowper (very well and at length), and the A.O.C. said “Stricken Deer” and passed on to the two St Theresas. After dinner at Government House (the keys were on the sideboard) an A.D.C. took me for an incomparably beautiful drive, smelling of orange-flowers, lights blazing out of caves and from the summit of the Rock, and then to see us off was my dear A.O.C., an older, thinner, tireder Antony Head, with a bunch of lilies and stocks and apple-blossom which are as fresh in my memory as they were that spring night. The boys were dossed down in the empty fuselage and, together, Dawson and I blew up my lilo. They dressed me in cotton-padded clothes and red-hot boots, and the air leaked out and the temperature fell to zero. I woke to the iron ribs of the aircraft, frozen stiff amid a crowd of stars. I was curiously happy with Algiers and all I had left, with the A.O.C., and with England, John Julius and Conrad ahead.
*
I spent almost a month in London and at the Bognor cottage. When I left, the sea-verge had been like a redoubtable barbican: now it was an area barred to non-residents, and, most surprising, there were the Mulberries floating at some distance from my garden wall. The townspeople and locals noticed them no longer, and would say if you asked their purpose that they thought they were some submarine defence. There were other explanations for them and for many other strange abnormal changes. None of them tallied with one another. The English were by then used to cover-stories, and accepted ignorance with relief. Personally I knew as little of the date of D-Day as the rest of the public, but, motoring through much of Surrey or Sussex, one felt that it must be imminent. Anyone who saw it will always remember the dense concentration of steel, its whole bulk open to a sky miraculously clear of the enemy.
Our house and garden at Bognor were a riot of disorder. Nothing had been wintered away, oiled, greased or tarpaulined; garden-tools, broken roofless sheds, old boots, siphons, filthy buckets, rats’ bodies, rotting sacks, nothing seemed to have resisted the fifth winter of war. My car, which I took to London, was full of dung, stones, hay and goat-pellets. I felt discouraged by the decay, but the skeleton stock had no eyes for dilapidation and were crowing and calving, clucking and pigging. London was exciting and bombless, Emerald unchanged, H. G. Wells dying without resignation, Victor Rothschild earning the George Medal by de-detonating anti-personnel bombs.
I lunched at Downing Street. The butler greeted me with: “X would like to see you before you go in.” X appeared with a warning that Adolph Berle, U.S. V.I.P., was lunching. When told I was fresh from Algiers for my son’s holidays, he had mumbled about American women not buzzing around for boys’ vacations. Clemmie, in defence, had said for all she knew I had come in a freight-boat, and would I keep to that supercherie. I said I would stick to the freight part, but couldn’t say ship for fear of being checked up, and that anyway I could easily avoid the subject, and what the hell had it to do with Mr Berle anyway? The conversation was on a very high global theoretical level. I was still as a waxwork and as dumb.
I travelled back with “Always Flies” Dawson, still without a permit, driving to Lyneham in the west through an English spring evening with sickle moon and smells of burgeoning life and tender green, the sky alive with new constellations of aircraft. We climbed into our ferry, the fuselage cleared for freight and nothing in it but my few pounds of junk and three mattresses for the A.V.M. and Mrs C., his P.A., and me. I dossed down, quickly donning padded coat and boots, to be unobtrusive. Dawson had a more elaborate coucher, Mrs C. wrapping him in soft warm armour and changing his socks. The engines were revving all they could while she soothed him with unhearable murmurings. By his mattress she set out his night-aids, two copies of Lilliput, his torch, his clock and water-jug. I noiselessly said K’s prayer and covered myself with an Australian sheep and my Bognor milking-jacket. The clock was there, the Perrier bottle of whisky to be drunk in case (or in lieu) of panic. I fell into an uneasy sleep.
At six I was peering through the window at a clear sky and a hera
lding glimmer from the east. The A.V.M. broke surface as the sun rose on Gibraltar, reached over to his P.A.’s dressing-case (Mrs C. still asleep), pinched her looking-glass and started shaving with Barbasol. The sun rose on the Rock. I could see darkest Africa on my right. The horses, my horses, were not even restive, but above the engine’s roar I heard Dawson yelling “Don’t forget, if you want to make yourself comfortable, just go to the end of the aircraft.” It was no good shaking one’s head and bawling out that one could wait. It was simpler to comply, so, after a decent pause, down the fuselage I walked gingerly to the little hygienic contraption, veiled by a piece of ragged and tattered sailcloth, which, if held by both hands, might achieve a partial privacy. Now these planes, unconverted to passengers, have no floors to deck their keels and down at the lowest level there is a big piece of glass, I suppose for the bomb-dropper to see what the terrain is like. Each side of the glass is almost too steeply rising for one to walk upon, so I naturally assumed that the glass was as thick as are pavement plates. I put my confident foot forward on to it and went bang-slap through up to my fork; fortunately I was walking so warily that all my balance was still on my back foot and I sat down quick and pulled my leg, well protected by flying-suit and boot, back to safety. The others would never have heard me go or realised my fall until Duff noticed that I did not alight. I felt that I had to admit to the breakage, so yelled the fact to the A.V.M., who quietly answered “We needn’t tell anyone, or say you did it.” I didn’t know what that meant. Mrs C. awoke and we ate chocolate and raisins.
