Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  The scene is like that on a transatlantic crossing, in a luxury liner, with all the horrors of enforced jocularity and expensive squalor … Diana is nervous: she darts, every so often, with enquiries to the hall-porter. As she staggers down the lobby like a doll with its leg put on sideways, the fellow-passengers point, ‘That’s Lady Diana. Doesn’t she look Bohemian!’ Duff is late. Why hasn’t he come home? Has he had a heart attack, been run over, bombed? [Duff returns.] Diana totters towards him. Instead of saying ‘Evening darling’ she stands at bay ten paces from him and snorts and snarls while he snarls back. They throw a few statements at one another, then dash lovingly into the elevator.

  Life in a grand hotel, indeed any hotel, suited Diana well. She felt singularly little of the nesting instinct common to most women. In the Dorchester all was uncluttered: ‘I feel as free of possessions as a bird – just the clothes I am wearing, the book I am reading, the letter that has to be answered.’ Provided she could be surrounded by her friends she would have been almost as happy in the park or in a public lavatory. In the Dorchester she could hold court. Conrad complained bitterly about ‘that horde of hard-faced tipsy women who occupy your sitting and bedroom from 6 p.m. onwards.’ Regular habituées were Ann O’Neill, Phyllis de Janzé, Maureen Stanley, Venetia Montagu, Juliet Duff, Moura Budberg, Virginia Cowles and Pamela Berry – some harder-featured and some no doubt tipsier than others.

  There was always something going on in the Dorchester: half a dozen tables of friends to join in the restaurant; a party at Emerald Cunard’s. She saw in the New Year on 31 December 1940 with Ann O’Neill. There were pipers downstairs and one was kidnapped, ‘a god of beauty seven feet high, golden haired with skirts skirling, bonnet at a brave angle, ribbons flying and that appalling noise coming from the pigskin under his arm’. Everyone swooned and said there was nothing like the pipes (‘There isn’t, thank God!’ was Diana’s comment) and then someone asked him to play the tune he had just played, which did not surprise him in the least since no one could ever recognize a tune on the bagpipes. So round and round he tramped, and then he played a reel and no one could dance it except Diana and her hostess, ‘so the old girl swirled and the weight lifted from my heart for a while. So maybe there is something to be said for the pipes after all.’

  That autumn the blitz burst over London. Diana telephoned Kommer. He was to approach the President, who in turn was to urge the Pope to call on the belligerents to stop bombing capital cities. Somewhere along the chain of command the message faltered and was lost. The disadvantages of the top floor of the Dorchester now became apparent as incendiaries thudded on the roof above, the building quivered as bombs fell all round and the anti-aircraft guns in the park seemed to be firing a few feet from the window. Duff slept peacefully through the worst of it, Diana was in an agony of apprehension from the first wail of the siren. After several prolonged arguments Duff finally agreed that they should sleep in the gymnasium, which had been turned into a dormitory. Night after night they shuffled down, to lie hugger-mugger with all that was most distinguished in London society. Everyone had their own torch, ‘and I see their monstrous profiles projected caricaturishly on the ceiling magic-lantern-wise. Lord Halifax is unmistakable.’ In the end Diana plucked up her courage and decreed that they should defy the Germans and remain in their own beds. The bombing began and Duff, seeing how his wife was suffering, insisted they should abandon their resolution and go downstairs. Diana refused. To encourage her, Duff went off alone to the gymnasium; Diana obstinately stuck it out; and the night ended with Duff fuming below and Diana in an agony of fear above.

  Diana longed to leave London, if only Duff would come too and the retreat could be arranged with dignity. A chance seemed to offer when Lord Lothian, British Ambassador in Washington, died in office. Might Duff get the vacant Embassy? ‘I’d ring Winston up and say please,’ Diana told John Julius, ‘if I didn’t know that Papa would throttle me.’ In the end the job went to Lord Halifax, and the occasional weekend in the country was the only escape from the blitz that Diana could contrive. Several times they went to Ditchley, home of the Ronald Trees, where Churchill used to pass the Saturdays and Sundays of full moon. Armed guards were at every door, the house swarming with D M Is and AOCs and other incomprehensible sets of initials in medals and red tabs. It was a great deal better than London but hardly relaxing.

  Other friends offered temporary refuges. They spent weekends with the Rothschilds at Tring and Waddesdon, Lord Dudley at Himley, the Wallaces at Lavington, the Gilbert Russells at Mottisfont. Only when she got away from the bombs did she realize how much she hated them. ‘It’s still pouring, but I wouldn’t mind if it was snowing ink,’ she wrote from Lavington. ‘Anything, anything, not to be in London. I don’t think I shall ever want to live there again – never, never.’ Friends suggested that she should stay with them when Duff went back; there was just as useful work to be done in the country. ‘I can’t desert Mr Micawber,’ Diana concluded sadly; and back they would trail at dawn on Monday.

  At Ewhurst, staying with the Duchess of Westminster, Diana retreated to bed while the others played bridge. The planes buzzed overhead and she felt scared and lonely. Discovering an empty bedroom directly above the bridge-players she crept along to it, jumped heavily on the floor and then rushed back to bed. One of the guests, Ian Fleming, came up to find the incendiary bomb. He agreed with Diana that they were absolute shits to leave her alone, and went happily back to finish the rubber. Diana let fifteen minutes pass, then went back to her bombing range, this time clambering on to a table before jumping. The crash shook the house and the whole party rushed upstairs. ‘Was that you, Diana?’ asked Duff suspiciously, but she seemed to be fast asleep and having got so far the bridge-players decided to go to bed.

  At Tring she discovered a deserted folly not far from the house and tried to persuade Lord Rothschild to let her take it over. She could rent it, she calculated, for £1 a week, as against £15 at the Dorchester, feed herself and Duff for £3 a week, ‘and wash him and soap him and light him to bed and give him Vichy water and his Times for another £1’. She would plant vegetables and keep hens, feed such friends as would venture down from London, and even be able to pay off the outstanding taxes. The idea enraptured her, and when it came to nothing she looked elsewhere. They had a cottage at Bognor; why should she not set up a farm there and provide a base where Duff could sleep away from the intrusive bombs?

  Bognor was not what it used to be. The evacuees had gone but monstrous accretions of barbed wire prevented access to the beach, a concrete pill-box and gun blocked the gate into the wood, and there were ARP workers sleeping in the stables. The land was still there, however, and any other problem could be overcome. Diana flung herself energetically into her new activity: buying bee-hives, a butter churn, a henhouse, four goats, a cow; building an outdoor fireplace ‘on which to bubble my trouble for the piggywigs’; poring over manuals on fowl-pox, fowl-pest, white diarrhoea and various unmentionable diseases of the udder, puzzling over the arcane lore proffered by Conrad Russell.

  Conrad made the exercise possible. Every week he deserted his own demanding occupations and spent a minimum of ten hours in the tedious travail of wartime railway journeys, so as to pass a night at Bognor and help with the farm. ‘Sweet Conrad, help me with my farm! Help me until it hurts, as Wilkie says. I’m sure you will!’ He did, profligate as ever in energy, advice, admiration and love. His sisters complained that he was being exploited. So he was, but to be exploited was his delight. ‘I love Bognor and your goodness to me in letting me come so often,’ he wrote, and when the farm was closed down he lost the greatest pleasure of his life.

  Princess, the cow, was the most valued member of the menagerie. The first night after her arrival she escaped and ambled off to rejoin her old friends at a neighbouring farm. Diana recaptured her and began to lead her home, taking with her a bag of cattle-meal as bait. All went well till they were passing the local shopping-centre, when Princess struck.
‘I pulled from in front and kicked from behind and hullaballooed and shouted and threatened and cursed and even pretended to eat the meal myself to show how good it was.’ Literally and metaphorically, Princess was unmoved. Eventually, a group of soldiers arrived and more or less carried the cow to its yard. There Diana milked and left her, but within a few minutes she was on the move again. Mrs Barham saw her go, but Mrs Barham was from London and thought all cows were dragons and refused to venture out until she was out of sight. For a few days Princess, consumed by nostalgia, sought endlessly to rejoin her former cronies, but then she settled down; a feminine equivalent of ‘Ferdinand’, Cecil Beaton described her, ‘for there never was so clinging and affectionate an animal’.

  Princess produced twenty pounds of cheese a week, as well as plentiful milk and butter. Diana was ‘white-fingered’, said Daphne Fielding, ‘so that milk in her hands turned serenely to golden butter and ambrosial cheese’. The goat proved more troublesome, tearing its udder on the barbed wire and trying to bite Diana when she milked it. It was part of the establishment, however, and she was proudly loyal to it. She got a peremptory note one morning from the head of the ARP workers who shared a stable with the goat. The smell was unpleasant, could the animal please be removed. It was a funny thing, replied Diana, but only that morning the goat had made the same complaint about the ARP workers. It was well known that nanny-goats didn’t smell, but she was going to get a billy goat if she could, and then the ARP workers would have something to complain about. ‘They ought to have a spell in London and smell burnt flesh, instead of lying in a comfortable room and smelling through their snores the smell that every farmer loves because it means produce and wealth and nourishment.’

  There was no Marie Antoinette posing about the farm. Problems proved endless. She had rations for only half her hens, so begged stale bread from the local baker. She was taken to law for her pains but fought the case and was acquitted with honour and a guinea costs. She had no pond for her ducks and bemoaned the fact that they were nevertheless saddled with ‘those awful feet. It seems dreadfully cruel, like taking the snow but leaving our skis on.’ The pigs grew large as ponies, knocked her over and trampled on her. The queen bee stung her on the nose. Misled by her Shakespearean recollections, she grasped the nettle danger and plucked from it not safety but a bad case of nettle-rash. She treated herself with morphine, which only doubled the agony because to some people the drug was an active itch-promoter. Princess developed rheumatic fever and had to be fed by hand. ‘Farming has got beyond me,’ she complained. ‘The crisis of high summer gives me no time for lunch even.’

  With it all she was sublimely happy. She had found a means of escaping from London with honour. She was doing work which she found unexpectedly fulfilling. She was making a real if small contribution to the war-effort. Duff got catarrh and urged Diana not to catch it too. Who, he asked, would run the farm if she did? ‘Oh, I shan’t be ill,’ replied Diana with less than her usual tact. ‘People with something vitally important to do never are ill.’ She had succeeded in creating a productive and efficient smallholding on relatively small expenditure. Princess was in calf; the goat giving rich, good milk; hens and ducks were laying; seven pigs ‘like dreadfully castrated little sods fat and white on tiny feet’ were fattening for the market; thirty-five rabbits of different ages followed the same course and provided gloves for airmen into the bargain; she was self-sufficient in everything but bread. For someone with no help save Conrad’s occasional visits and with no previous experience of any kind, it was an impressive achievement. ‘I did not dream last winter,’ she told Kommer, ‘in my very acute misery, that I could be happy again, and here I find myself beginning my fourth month without once leaving the country, as happy as I have been for so long a period for years and years. I always knew London was not for me. I never want to see it again, poor city. It is a seat of nervous futility to me, while the life of an intelligent rustic labourer suits me to perfection.’

  When Diana was still dreaming of her pavilion at Tring she explained to St John Hutchinson how nice it would be for Duff to be able to come home to the country every evening. ‘You wouldn’t ask Duff to do that, surely?’ said Hutchinson in dismay.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, you can’t expect him to spend every evening alone with you. He likes bridge and fun.’

  ‘Yes, but he likes the country and reading and quiet from bombs also.’

  ‘Well, I think that’s really asking too much of him!’

  Diana was humiliated and alarmed. Would Duff so dislike the life of a wartime commuter? If he did, he concealed it. He kept a room in the basement of the Chapel Street house, where Daisy Fellowes was now ensconced, but most evenings made the journey to Bognor and seemed to thrive on it.

  Life in fact offered more than the secluded tranquillity that St John Hutchinson envisaged. Evelyn Waugh came for the weekend to find the Duchess of Westminster already there, ‘Diana with grimy hands fretting about coupons and pig-swill. Fine wine. Vice Versa read aloud, gin rummy.’ He returned in mid-week to find Desmond MacCarthy, Katharine Asquith and Maud Russell staying. Diana enlisted them all to help with the chores on the farm and managed to convince them that it was fun. Emerald Cunard descended in her country clothes – leopard-skin coat, pearls, béret basque and exceedingly high-heeled shoes. She teetered around: ‘Oh, Diana, this is very interesting! How do you do it? These are your pigs? Very interesting pigs! How can you milk that cow?’ She insisted on carrying the milk and was butted to the ground by Princess, who evidently took exception to her leopard-skin. Food was always excellent, wine good and plentiful; one evening Ronald Storrs came down with Duff and the three of them consumed four bottles of claret and one of port.

  Duff was all the more ready to leave London because his work at the Ministry of Information filled him with chagrin and distaste. Eventually his resignation was accepted and he was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, traditionally the odd-job man of the Cabinet. The first odd job was already awaiting him. Churchill was uneasy about the state of preparation of the British in the Far East. Duff, it was decreed, was to go out there to take a look.

  TEN

  ASIA AND ALGIERS

  While Diana had been rusticating at Bognor, the war had taken a decisive turn, with Hitler’s attack on Russia. There were many of her class who viewed Communism with such loathing that they would almost have made common cause with Nazi Germany rather than welcome Russia as an ally. Diana had no such inhibitions. ‘People hate Russians because they are Communists,’ she explained to John Julius, ‘and have done atrocious things to their own people and would like to convert us all to their highly unsuccessful ways, but I prefer Russians infinitely to Huns and fear their creed so much less than Nazism that I have no swallowing trouble over fighting on their side. Communism has at least an idealist aim – men are equals, no nations, all races are brothers, share your cow with your neighbour. Never be caught by people who say that Russia is worse than Germany – just consider if they are rich or poor.’

  Now another extension of the war was threatening. It seemed inevitable that Japan would soon be fighting against us, and Duff’s new mission was therefore overdue if not already too late. It never occurred to Diana that she should not accompany him: if her husband were going into any sort of danger, then of course she must go too. Anyway, she had never visited the East and greatly looked forward to the experience. There was less enthusiasm among officials and military. A single VIP could be shuttled to and fro with comparative ease; accompanied by a wife the problems were worse than doubled. ‘That is bad,’ commented Oliver Harvey severely, when he heard Diana was to join the trip. ‘It will create the worst impression among the poor soldiers and sailors who cannot have their wives.’ Duff must have been aware of such feelings, but he seems to have made no attempt to dissuade Diana. He probably thought the objections nonsensical – knowing as he did that Diana would not expect anything in the way of special treatment – and
reckoned that, anyway, once she had made her mind up it would take more than her husband and the combined Chiefs of Staff to stop her.

  For Diana the only real deterrents were her affection for her animals and her horror of flying. The previous year in Texas she had for the first time been coaxed into the air. The weather was perfect, the aircraft both luxurious and secure, the pilot skilled and sympathetic, the country flat as a pancake, and Diana hated it more than anything she had done in her life before. ‘Your mother is a shuddering funky, old mouse and you must make the best of it,’ she wrote dolefully to John Julius. Now she was confronted by a vista of almost endless travel, much of it in dangerous conditions and under threat of enemy attack. Crowning offence, Imperial Airways had just been rechristened BOAC, removing any tincture of romance that might otherwise have flavoured the projected flight.

  At least the first leg of the journey took her to New York and a brief reunion with her son. Her presence was needed. Mrs Paley had advanced ideas about education and brought up her own children at arms’ length with the help of stiff Austrian nurses in white coats who were regularly changed in case the children became attached to them and a psychiatrist to oversee their playpen. John Julius had arrived with a nanny to whom he was devoted. Mrs Paley was dismayed by this and blamed on it every defect in her English visitor, even down to his occasional car-sickness. Nanny must go. Diana pleaded that in England middle-aged men still loved their nannies and would confide in them. This confirmed Mrs Paley’s worst suspicions. ‘Although I like her and admire her enormously,’ Diana told Conrad, ‘I had to refrain from saying that anyway the result was a brave race, not a cissy lot screaming “Don’t send the boys over!”’ Eventually compromise was reached: Nanny was exiled, but only to the secretary’s house at the bottom of the garden.