by Cecil Beaton
The journey, over red, dusty, tufted earth and desert, takes only forty minutes. On arrival at Government House we go through the lodge and along an avenue of marvellously smelling pine trees. His Excellency is immediately at his desk. The guests investigate the low, rambling country house. It is all very comfortable and totally protected from the harshness of the world outside.
The heatwave continues. It is like a pall over the country. Today the temperature rose to 107 degrees. After a luncheon party for some visiting judges (luckily cold food), it was arranged that we should go and see an estancia — a sheep station.
Accompanied by the Comptroller, Colonel Rodriguez, we went off, over dirt-track roads, in the old-fashioned Rolls. Hermetically sealed inside, we were air-conditioned though the dust came through and up our noses. The poor chauffeur in heavy uniform was almost passing out. The countryside through which we drove was like Palestine; the eucalyptus in the distance looking like olive trees; rolling blue mountains and dun-coloured hills. The sheep looked pretty miserable in the drought. It was a surprise to find the person in charge of the station was a woman.
In the heatwave we went out to the various sheds. This is where the men are doing repair work to the cars. This is where the sheep are sheared, 200 a day, or, if they are very big ones, only 100. The place stank. But the stink and the heat here was as nothing compared with the next visit, a shed on which the sun poured, and which was filled with the pelts of sheep that had recently died in the drought and heat. The hot, rancid, pepper smell was too much to endure for long but the lady in charge was oblivious to heat and smell and continued to natter in her baby voice: ‘I love it so much here that I never want to leave.’
One realized how at the mercy of the elements a great proportion of the earth’s inhabitants are. If no rain comes then there is a general exodus; all the herds are driven away towards water. Sometimes the drought is so appalling that hundreds of thousands of animals die of heat and starvation.
Then the dryness is such that bush fires start. A woman in hospital, burnt beyond recognition, said, before she died, how grateful she was that all five of her children had survived. One woman, surrounded by fire, jumped into a water tank for safety but was boiled alive. The Australians do not seem to feel that their lot is a particularly hard one. They are not sorry for themselves.
It was a relief to come back to the luxuries of Government House.
Reddish
The news of Mrs Rhoda Templemore-Richardson’s pathetic demise came the same morning that Timothy, the cat, fell into a tub of paraffin and weedkiller. His subsequent sufferings were dreadful to behold, with a raw backside and legs robbed of fur. But now, a week later, he seems to be recovering, thanks to the skill of a kind vet and the ministrations of the Smallpeices.[9] The cat, apart from the pain and stink, was intensely humiliated by his condition and his sorry appearance.
Mrs Templemore-Richardson was denied a quiet end to her life. She slaved so hard to look after her drunkard husband that she died suddenly of heart failure. She was a key figure in the village, a tragic woman whose love and public-spiritedness were a substitute for a happy private life.
Mrs Templemore-Richardson, a hoarder, left a houseful of hideous junk and old magazines; under her bed a trunk that had not been unpacked since she returned from Australia ten years ago.
Dr Burroughes, her closest friend and neighbour, informed us that she denied herself so much that she spent practically nothing on heat and food and had two hot baths a day to keep warm. Paradoxically she spent liberally on clothes and her house was filled with ensembles and hats by the hundreds which she never wore. Meanwhile, the husband is in hospital complaining that he is not given his two bottles of whisky a day.
I found the Rhoda Templemore-Richardson’s story, that of a too-good woman, very disturbing. If she had not taken her husband back after eighteen years, she might have had a much healthier and happier closing to her days. It seems saintliness doesn’t pay off in this life.
THE QUEEN MOTHER TO LUNCH
Pelham Place: April 1968
Last time I was honoured in this way, Edith Sitwell was the pièce de résistance. Truman Capote had arrived an hour early and together with Eileen we had watched from a top window as a huge ambulance drove up to the house, and a pair of stalwart men moved to bring the poet out into the daylight. A pair of very long medieval shoes appeared, then a muffled figure and finally a huge, golden melon of a hat. Edith was wheeled into place and given two strong martinis. This time the mood struck me as much calmer.
The other guests arrived: Roy Strong in a psychedelic tie; Kirsty Hesketh, hatless and dressed by Courrèges like a child’s idea of a primrose; Leo d’Erlanger, mundane in a black coat and wearing a hat which he subsequently forgot; Jakie Astor; Irene Worth, just right in non-colours; and Diana Cooper, casual, as beautiful as ever, with her habitual basket occupied by Doggie, the chihuahua.
The Queen Mother’s huge limousine arrived and out stepped the smiling, delightful, familiar figure. She was dressed in brilliant puce and magenta. ‘The last time ... poor Edith,’ the delightful hesitancy, wistful eyes. ‘How nice and warm your house is. I’m cold from sitting to Mr Ward. Sitting produces its own coldness, doesn’t it?’
Introductions: I suddenly found myself nervous and stumbling over my words. Roy calm-headed. The topic was the lack of painted portraiture today. Would Graham Sutherland be good to paint the Queen? ‘Why not you?’ the Queen asked me. Controversial subjects such as Lord Snowdon and his documentary film about old age were avoided; Prince Charles eulogized, and perhaps just a suggestion of criticism for his father sending him to a tough school. ‘Now he doesn’t need to be toughened any more.’
The Queen applauded the reappearance of the old Tatler. I described the attack on its existence by The Observer. ‘What’s this I hear?’ asked Jakie, ready to defend the family honour, and conversation became general. Leo spoke the English language in a flowery manner that is seldom used by Englishmen today but which is utterly delightful. The Queen, on hearing a particularly well-planned compliment, said: ‘I must remember that.’ Now, Diana, Doggie nestling in a shiver at her bosom, with vodka and wine under her belt, did a virtuoso piece on spending the weekend with the ‘Horse’, Harold Macmillan, and described how Ava Waverley had been ‘décommandé’. The fact that Macmillan was continually referred to as the ‘Horse’ added to the Queen’s enjoyment.
The Queen’s car had arrived. It was ignored. Half an hour later the Queen asked Jakie the time. ‘I must go!’ As the Queen stood in the street, while a few onlookers gawked, I managed to speak out: ‘I want to thank you for being always such a support and good friend to me.’ The car drove away — smiles, bows, waves…
The party was soon over, for the other guests were late too. But it had been a whizz, hadn’t it, said Diana.
I have been going through all the old boxes of hoarded letters. The past comes alive with shocking vividness. So many forgotten incidents and discarded love affairs come to light and surprise me.
Some of the letters and documents make me sad; some almost stop the heart beating; the telegram announcing my father’s death, the piece of paper with the scribbled words ‘out’ and ‘in’ left on the hall table indicating that my brother Reggie was out; he would never come back to write that he was in. A lifetime in a bundle of miscellaneous papers.
DIANA COOPER
Reddish: June 1968
Diana does not wish to pay for a dog’s ticket on a train, so it is as well that Doggie is the smallest chihuahua in the world and can be hidden in a basket. Diana, her arm bad from neuralgia, was hugging her leopard-skin bag; no Salisbury porters, of course, but she had no complaints. She has a marvellously Spartan approach to everything. I don’t know how she manages to get to all the places she does, under her own steam, no qualms, no anxieties. She appears. Diana is a phenomenon. If she were forty she’d be a remarkable character, but the extra thirty-seven years have only enhanced her strength of personality,
her honesty, directness and, to use a word she loathes, integrity. We had a discussion about the word. Gertrude Stein had integrity, but who hasn’t? It’s an Americanized word; she takes it for granted; those without it are beyond the pale.
From the moment of her arrival, Eileen and I had no chance of a word in edgeways. At seven o’clock I interrupted the flow: ‘For a change the sun’s come out. Let’s go into the garden.’ Diana knows a lot about plants. She knows a lot about everything. She learns all the time and never forgets, so by now she is a mine of information, which is all the more remarkable because she was never educated. But she loves to buy a book in order to learn how to do grafting, or patchwork, or how the digestive tract works, or how broken hips are joined at the socket.
All evening long Diana talked. It was as if she was starved of talk. Yet she has been away among crowds of friends every weekend and her London life is full to the brim. It was pointless to try to stem the conversation, or to interrupt with a query. She just goes on and on. One might as well relax and enjoy to the full the biblical and Shakespearean quotes. And her memory never falters. One cannot believe it, and yet Diana never lies. Diana said she had hated lying to her strict, conventional ambitious mother about her love affairs, her bohemian tendencies; for instance about the hours she spent going round Regent’s Park in a taxi necking with Basil Hallam (Gilbert the Filbert). She said it was so wonderful when she married Duff for she never had to lie to her mother again.
I suddenly thought that it was not until I heard Diana on the radio once that I realized how much she has retained of her Victorian-Edwardian upbringing and aristocratic code of manners and speech. ‘One wasn’t critical at that age.’ ‘One was too young to criticize.’ ‘She was lovely, Gaby Deslys; she was splendid, Ethel Levy; she was all that one imagines a Queen of Beauty to be, Mary Curzon.’ Diana is a good mimic and can make the face of the person she is describing.
Diana talked of Felix Youssoupoff, and said how she had wanted the great, dazzling beauty to marry her elder sister Marjorie. She told of his kindness to other exiles; how at midnight his flat was invaded by all those who came to lie on the floor for a night’s shelter. She told of Jo Widener, who tricked Felix into selling his Rembrandts for a third of their value, and how when in court he ridiculed this ‘painted man with high heels’. Diana talked about the horrors of keeping people alive long after they should be dead. ‘Can’t be bothered,’ she said about giving any after-death presents to friends. Diana used to be remaking her will all the time, but now the whole caboodle goes to ‘my darling John Julius whose only faults are that he enjoys the pleasures of the flesh’.
We discussed modern art, and where and when it became too difficult to understand. Diana said her taste stopped at early Cézanne and she will not pretend to keep up with the times. We talked until midnight about cancer.
It is late, and Diana will still delay on the landing, her tactics perfected. She said she slept very little. I did not turn on the burglar alarm as I know she prowls about in the early morning. Recently she inadvertently set off the alarm and the police stampeded into the yard at seven in the morning.
Diana on Sunday was non-stop euphoria in spite of the rain; the Pre-Raphaelite scene down by the river; so many birds; lunch at a friend’s house in the next valley complete and utter delight with all the rhododendrons, azaleas and bluebells at Stourhead.
Non-stop talk on the way home, refusing to cease even when the car came to rest in the garage. Talk all evening and late into the night. We were all exhausted, but not Diana.
STOURHEAD
June 14th
The rhododendrons and azaleas were no longer at their best on this second visit to Stourhead. When I went with Diana two weeks ago the crowds on the lakeside looked like personages in an eighteenth-century landscape. The wonderful honey scent of the azaleas was powerful and reminded me of my first heart-throbs at Harrow School. Today there were few people. The calm water and the ever-changing and beautiful compositions of trees were idyllic in the haze of the early morning. It was the sort of day we wait all winter (and spring) to enjoy. The birds seemed to share our ecstasy. In the water the moorhens took off in a dripping euphoria leaving lines of bubbles in the water. The swans were admiring their wings, and the distant shriek of a peacock was not discordant.
Jayne Wrightman’s pleasure at the scene was a joy to behold. She is a true lover of beauty in many of its forms. This was a day she had long looked forward to and the whole setting put on a performance of which Hoare would have been proud; the ingenious planting of many variegated trees, the contrasting colours and forms; weeping willows as tall as ilexes, firs as we would expect to see them only in India, maples, the white handkerchief tree; dark mahogany copper beeches; golden oaks, Chinese magnolias of every variety; on the way round the lake wherever one looked a new and equally beautiful picture could be seen.
A horrible summons to New York shatters the peace. I have to make a certain amount of money to go on living in the way I do (two houses a great burden). So I have to jump at an opportunity to do a big New York production, but as bad luck has it, this always happens in the summer so that the garden I’ve longed for all winter and spring has to be abandoned, and my tranquillity of mind upset.
Reddish
It is the fledgling season and there are more birds about. The cat, Timothy, has behaved according to his instincts and has had an orgy of slaughter. Ray, washing up by the kitchen sink, is talking to me through the hatch. Suddenly he is silent; he pops his head out of the window; then a minute later says, ‘I’ve seen the most incredible sight! That cat was standing looking up at the yew tree when suddenly he sprang, like a tiger, about eight feet into the air and came down with a young bird in his mouth.’
For as many hours as he wishes, Timothy sleeps on my bed. One day in the garden the Smallpeices complained to me of Timothy’s beastliness. He had climbed up the yew trees, upset the too-young-to-fly birds from their nest, and come down with a mouthful of yellow and grey feathers. Corpses of other young birds lay around while bereft mothers flew about hysterically screaming at their tragic loss. Suddenly I loathed the white, decorative cat. How could I allow him on my bed? In a flash all affection for him had vanished.
Many times during the night he returned to scratch and miaow outside my door. But he was not allowed in. I felt the absurdity of my attitude. Perhaps Mrs Smallpeice has the right perspective when she says: ‘One cannot blame him, it is his nature; but to see it happen makes one angry.’
A SUNDAY AT REDDISH
June 1968
There was the nice friendly driver from the car hire service to meet me at the airport and drive me to the quiet realm of Broadchalke. Never have I been more pleased to return to my haunts.
Incredible standard roses were growing in the gardens of the ugly villas on the way; every village was a bower of flowers, the meadowsweet lamp-post high. Everything is burgeoning in this marvellous spell of sun and heat. It was the best time of the year and as we drove up I could see the house bedecked with apricot rose fronds. Eileen ran out in a state of euphoria. For two days she had been savouring to the full this peak moment. ‘Look!’ I was ravished by what I saw. In the interval from last Sunday every rose had come out; it was a plethora. I had never seen so many cushions of pale blossoms. After twenty years, the garden seemed at last to look as I want it to look.
In pleasurable mood I walked round every corner and twist of the garden and gradually the strain of the past week was forgotten. And what a strain it had been! The air trip to and from New York, the delays caused by the ‘go slow’, the three long conferences to discuss the project on hand, a musical about Chanel.
Then the return to London to cope with chores there before going off to Paris, and the terrible strain of listening to Chanel talk about herself without stopping from 1.30 to 5.30. Never once was I allowed to ask her a straightforward question, so really the exercise was fruitless, except to make ‘friendly contact’. But the whole week was a ru
sh against the clock, meetings and dinners, a visit to the osteopath, and the British Embassy Ball; too much to fit in, let alone remember, in such a short time. But miraculously I returned all in one piece (as the Queen says) and able for two days to relax and savour summer.
PRINCESS MARINA
August 1968
When I think of Princess Marina I remember her deep, serious voice, and her sad smile of compassion. I remember her shock at being greeted in the street in Florence where she was never recognized as at home in England, and she was suddenly reminded that she was not just an ordinary private individual. I recall the many photographic sessions in the garden at Coppins with her husband and children, and, at the studio, when she would arrive with a picnic lunch-basket and boxes containing Greek national dress and her formal gown complete with orders and decorations. I can see now the expression of intense concentration as, with dust sheet on the sitting-room floor, she worked with crayons and pencils at her easel. I remember her amusement at Vaynol in North Wales when slowly and ridiculously I fell into a lake fully dressed; and after a dance at her country house when she and her sisters, in nightgowns, laughed with the other house guests about the incidents of the evening.
The arrival in England of the strangely beautiful Princess Marina of Greece to marry our Prince George gave us all an excitement and stimulus that will be hard to forget. Those who had the good fortune to meet her could see the cool classical features in a perfect oval head held high on a straight column of neck, the topaz eyes, the slightly tilted smile, the apricot complexion, and the nut-brown cap of flat silken curls.