by Diana Cooper
On to Williamsburg today to see what a colonial town in Virginia in the time of Queen Anne looks like. They have restored it to look exactly as it did. New York next day.
Kiluna Farm,
Manhasset, Long Island
November 12th, 1939
This letter will probably get to you before the last one I wrote you about Washington because I’m giving it to Ronnie Tree who leaves on the Clipper7 tomorrow. It’s a month since I left, and I haven’t had a letter from anyone except Conrad,8 and one from Hutchie9 by air. I really can’t wait to hear something of you. Tomorrow we are off to the Southern States for ten days and there will be seven lectures and seven or eight nights in the train. When we get back to N.Y. we shall be wrecks. I spend half my day at the washing basin scrubbing Papa’s socks and drawers and pyjamas and handkerchiefs, and the other half ironing them and perpetually burning them. You will say why don’t you send them to a laundry. The answer is that everything in this country is so expensive that it hurts my sensitive Scotch soul, and what Papa flings away on tips and leaving money about, and not taking the trouble to learn the currency and so giving 50 cents instead of 10 cents, I try to make up for by pathetic economies. We had a very successful lecture at Summit, New Jersey, the state on the other side of the Hudson river from N.Y. They’ve built a splendid tunnel, bigger and better and faster and generally more impressive than the Mersey Tunnel. We had dinner before the speech with an old American family, good and noble and high-principled and delightful. Grace before our dinner which was at half-past six. We had to eat the food though I wanted to regurgitate. I thought of you. Papa likes a drink before a lecture, but this home disapproved of anything but water!
This home, which belongs to Mr. Paley, the President of the Columbia Broadcasting, has too much alcohol on the other hand. Result – I’ve got a headache today and wish that I was back with the fine American middle-class family in spite of their abstinence.
I enclose the man I shot at in the Criminal Investigation Department with a hand machine-gun. My Washington letter will explain.
British Embassy
Washington
November 19th, 1939
At last I’ve got a scrubby little letter from you dated 29 October. You are the nastiest little pig I know and I despise the school for not urging you to be a little less beastly. Do you realise that you let eighteen days pass without giving your poor frightened exiled mother a thought? Please, darling horror, don’t do it again. Write as often as you can. It’s so sad waiting for letters that don’t come and are not even written.
I’m writing on very thin loo paper because airmail is so expensive and it goes by weight. Papa and I spend every night in the train, Papa up above monkeywise. He’s more like a monkey than I was because up above there is a criss-cross arrangement of green tape like a cage to keep him from being shot out. Most nights he lectures and yesterday at Pittsburgh, a huge town where they make steel (their Sheffield) he had to speak for an hour at 10 a.m. They gave him in return a large ivory penknife with the giver’s name which happened to be Duff engraved upon it. I should claim it from him when we get home. He’s more likely to cut himself than you are. It’s hot as summer and Washington is all avenues of trees and spaces and big beautifully designed offices for Government. Tonight it’s the train again for Charlotte, N. Carolina, and the next night train again to New York, three days break and off to Canada. I love my darling boy. Don’t treat me so badly again or I’ll have your lights and liver when I get home.
November 29th, 1939
Here we are at Ottawa where the Governor General of Canada lives in kingly splendour. He’s called Lord Tweedsmuir and we curtsey to him as though he were the King himself. Last evening Papa was on his legs bawling away at Boston Massachusetts and at 11 p.m. we got into our train bed and got out again at Utica, N.Y. State. There we waited an hour and had a glorious breakfast if rather curious, i.e. coffee, grapefruit juice, drop scones made of buckwheat, sausages, bacon and over the lot maple-sugar syrup. On again in a boiling train that went about three miles an hour and stopped with a sickening jolt at every station. My feet swelled with the heat and my back ached and we were both in a kind of coma, like people in a submarine that’s gone wrong. At last we came to the majestic St. Lawrence river that divides Canada from U.S. and where there is no frontier nonsense, no soldiers or forts or things like Mussolini ha sempre ragione10 (do you remember?). Canada and the U.S.A. understand and trust each other, hence the simplification.
Don’t forget to love me. I feel so far from you and frightened that you’ll grow away from me. Be determined not to, for if you did it would break my heart.
Deshler-Wallick Hotel
Columbus, Ohio
About December 7th, 1939
This will probably be your Christmas letter and where am I to imagine you as being? Where will you be delving into a bulging stocking? I hope at Belvoir. Wherever you are I want you to have a lovely lovely Christmas full of fun and presents and treats, and for war to be forgotten, anyway for the day. It’s the first Christmas I shall not be with you and I mind it dreadfully. Please pray hard that we’ll be together next year and that Hitler will be defeated, and that we’ll all be trying to mend our poor England. I shan’t be much of a mender because I’m so tired and weak, but you’ll have to do a lot about it, and so will Papa.
What a day we had yesterday. We tumbled out of the train at 6.30 a.m. at Cleveland, Ohio, and there were the merciless photographers and reporters. At 11 a.m. Papa gave a lecture. Then came a luncheon of 500 strangers at the end of which Papa had to answer their questions about the European situation. Then a two-hour motor drive with strangers and dinner with them and another lecture, and then an endless supper with a different lot of strangers at a place called Canton, Ohio. Then a two-hour motor drive to a place called Youngstown, and at last we tumbled back into the train at 1.30 a.m. – nineteen hours running without a break. We woke up next morning in Toronto, Canada, where everyone is in khaki and off to the war. Now we’re at Troy, N.Y. State, very unlike my idea of Troy, no Greeks, no gods, no visible heroes. These Trojans make shirts for all America to wear. Tomorrow we shall be in Boston, and so it goes on.
Just arrived Boston and found a wonderful account written by Martin of his torpedoing. Also three letters from Conrad and one from Hutchie and a scrubby little bit from you. Really your letters are too horrid, one side of a sheet, not one word of affection or love. This one only told me your gym master had been ill. It was not even signed. You can’t think how disappointing it is to get a letter like that. You used to write lovely long ones before you went to school.
Sunday, December 17th, 1939
Our mad bout of travelling is ending for a bit. In three days we shall get two weeks without lectures. Papa is like you and wants to sit quiet in town and go to the theatres and eat and drink and play cards, and wink at the lovely ladies, while I, as you know me, am trying to put a bit more enterprise and adventure into it. I am drawn to the snows, or to the hot beaches of Florida, or to cowboys or Indians or something. Papa will win.
The other night when we arrived at the lecture hall in Brooklyn we saw it to be completely surrounded by policemen with bludgeons. We were half an hour too early, so we went and sat at a café opposite and watched developments. It was raining and soon sad bedraggled young men began to appear carrying placards which read ‘Send Duff Home’, ‘We Won’t be Dragged into War’, ‘Don’t Listen to English Lies’ and so on, but no one was paying the slightest attention to them. When we got inside there were still more cops but nothing happened at all – no demonstration, no row. The only effect it had was to give us a friendly crowd at the stage door when we left. They cheered us.
I’m not expecting to get any Christmas presents. I hope you get a great many, you darling little boy. Write by air on a typewriter. There is sure to be one at Belvoir if you can get around the secretary. You write longer and better letters on the machine, I think.
The Ambassador Hotel
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Park Avenue, New York
January 3rd, 1940
We had a lovely New Year’s Eve sitting up in a large kitchen till 5 o’clock a.m. cooking eggs and bacon and people were still dropping in when I left, treating night as day. I wonder how it all went at Belvoir, and if it’s all very different to normal times.
Yesterday I went to the Natural History Museum. It’s as lovely here as ours in London is awful. I missed you a lot. There were so many revolting exhibits you would have rejoiced in. One extraordinary peepshow was how a room, for instance, looks to you and how it looks to a dog. A dog sees no colour, whereas a fly sees more colours than we do. A hen sees other hens bigger or smaller according to the other’s pecking abilities and she sees the cock-a-doodle-doo enormous, though how they can tell I don’t know. No more do I believe they do.
The streets are still covered with ice and the roofs with snow. Tomorrow we start on our travels again. In two months we shall be starting home. I haven’t heard from you in a long, long time. All the ships are delayed and the Clippers too. Label your letters ‘Clipper’ and get them stamped. It’s 1/6d the ½ oz.
Hotel Oliver
South Bend, Indiana
January 14th, 1940
We are keeping our peckers up splendidly. Sometimes it is gloomy and dull and other days the town is bright, the hotel lovely and the people full of life and fun, and everything seems good. South Bend, Indiana, is the worst we have been to, whereas Toledo, Ohio, was heavenly. At Akron, Ohio, there was a restaurant called the Hawaiian Room. It would have amused you, I think. It was very very dark with a sort of witch-doctory light on the tables. The bar was a native hut, but the fun was that one wall was a panorama scene of a coral reef – a sandy bay edged with palm trees. Suddenly, though no one was there except Papa and me and a group of very old ladies having lunch together, the panorama darkened and flooded itself with torrential rain. The artificial thunder and blinding lightning deafened us for ten minutes . . .
Now I must get up and wash Papa’s vest and drawers and socks and pack and have lunch and listen to the lecture and catch a train to Chicago where with any luck there will be a letter from you.
Fort Worth, Texas
(‘Where the West Begins’)
January 28th, 1940
I’ve had lovely letters from you lately. Belvoir sounds a hatful of fun and the letters were long and full of the kind of thing I like. What luck to have ice! It’s been ridiculously cold here but I haven’t smelt a ski or a skate. It was 22 below zero in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and snowing in Alabama, which should be as hot as summer, and at Palm Beach, Florida – where I have always been too hot in January, swimming and sweating alternately – it was so cold that they had to shut all the schools. They have no heating arrangements as it’s always hot, so they thought the children would suffer and get ill. Palm Beach is known as the ‘millionaires’ playground’. Lorna Mackintosh’s11 father runs a bar there called the ‘Alibi’ Bar, his name being Ali. I think Ali-Bar-Bar would have been a funnier name.
Believe it or not I went flying yesterday.12 A man who had a two-engined, two-piloted plane offered to take us for a joyride. The conditions seemed perfect – no wind and perfect visibility – ground flat as a pancake and few buildings, so I thought it a golden opportunity of breaking the ice. Oh John Julius, how I hated it! I had to stay up an hour and twenty minutes and I was agonised with fear all the time, but of course couldn’t say so and the owner thought I was liking it and kept telling the pilot to go further and to circle round things. When you turn in a plane you tip right over and see the ground alongside you, and you feel you’re going about five miles an hour because nothing passes you in the way of hedges or traffic. So if it wasn’t alarming it would be boring and I shan’t go up again ever for fun. All the old ladies travel by air in this country and nobody thinks anything of it, but your mother is a shuddering funky old mouse and you must make the best of her.
Kansas City, Missouri
(‘The Heart of America’)
I got a delightful letter from you yesterday, still from Belvoir. How can you explain your letters being so horrible to start with, and so nice now? Was it, is it, the dreadful influence of school, do you suppose? We went to see Gone with the Wind at Oklahoma City, and when we got into the theatre all the audience stood up and ‘God Save the King’ was played. The Americans are all very pro-Ally, thank goodness, but they are also determined not to get into the war. Someone in the question period after the lecture always asks ‘Why didn’t England stop Germany sooner?’ and Papa answers ‘Because all our actions and all our policy was affected by wishing to keep out of the war. There is no policy more dangerous – every insult will be put upon you if the offender knows you will not fight, and in the end you are forced into it.’ That makes them think a bit. I wonder often if all our dear sailors of the Enchantress are safe. Hitler’s sharks are so hungry.
One more stop in Amarillo, Texas, and then the real West. San Francisco next. Papa has gone American, but not much hope I fear of his going cowboy. He’s been given a white Texan hat, but not what they call a ten-gallon Tom Mix one.13 Still, he wears it with a certain swagger.
February 7th. We’re in the desert now, in Arizona – distant spiky mountains and all the rest desert covered with a grey-blue-lavender sort of bush and tiny stunted palm plants; soon there will be cactuses like this:
February 8th. The cactuses have come and gone.
February 9th. We woke up, still in our train, to find the world changed from desert to garden. California is as green as England in May and laden with flowers and fruit – orange trees, mimosa, eucalyptus trees, grapefruit, vines. It’s a paradise of sun and sea and plenty – the Promised Land, milk and honey everywhere. I’ve seen it before but Papa hadn’t, so he is doing a Cortez. If you don’t know what that means get a book of well-known poems and look at a sonnet by Keats called ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’.
El Mirasol
Santa Barbara
California
February 1940
I’m in Hollywood you’ll be thrilled to hear and who should I sit next to the other night but your favourite Errol Flynn. He certainly is very good-looking but I’m sorry to tell you I took a violent dislike to him. First of all he was disgustingly anti-English, which being an Australian-Irishman he should not be, and secondly he’s got an awful lot of ‘side’, and kept on pointing out other men as giving themselves airs. Another night I sat beside Charlie Chaplin. He has dyed his grey hair black to look like Hitler in the new film14 he has just finished. They say that he has made dictators so ridiculous that we ought to show the picture on a screen opposite the German trenches and thereby stop the war.
Marlene Dietrich we often see – she wears a velvet trouser suit with Fauntleroy collar and cuffs. Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh are here. She’s made the greatest success ever known in Gone with the Wind. My favourite is a young man called James Stuart. I saw him acting in the studios yesterday. All the time I wish I had you with me. It would amuse you so much to see the sets indoors and out. I saw for instance yesterday the inside of Waterloo Station and a trainload of Tommies steaming out of it. You turn a corner and there is Peking under snow and a London street next to Tarzan’s jungle. The quite big trees are on flat wooden trays so they can be transplanted on wheels. I lunched there in the studio restaurant among Austrian peasants, Nazis in uniform, Victorian young ladies, Napoleonic young men. Another thing that you’d love is films called ‘blow-outs’ of 1938 or 1939. These are all the pieces cut out of films because actors either forget their words, or drop something, or fall down. They always swear of course, and those are the bits you see. We are staying with Mr and Mrs Jack Warner in great luxury. He is the head of Warner Bros. We’ve been over the Metro-Goldwyn studios and tomorrow we go over Warner’s.
Back next month. Pray for us both – pray for Hitler’s sharks not to catch us.
* * *
1 The boarding school to which my London
day school, Egerton House, had been evacuated on the outbreak of war.
2 The long narrative poem by Lord Macaulay. Learning and reciting poetry by heart was my only source of pocket money.
3 In August–September 1937, when my father was First Lord of the Admiralty, we had sailed in the Enchantress around the north of Scotland from Holyhead to Rosyth, and had run into dreadful weather round the aptly named Cape Wrath.
4 The New York World’s Fair was staged at Flushing Meadows in 1939 and 1940.
5 Twentieth Century Fox, 1939. The two name parts were played by Spencer Tracy and Cedric Hardwicke respectively.
6 Now the FBI.
7 A transatlantic airline using flying boats.
8 Conrad Russell. Bachelor friend of my mother (see Directory of Names).
9 St John Hutchinson, K.C. (see Directory).
10 Mussolini is always right. When my mother had taken me skiing two years before, we had seen these words in huge letters at the Italian frontier.
11 A childhood friend.
12 She was always terrified of flying. This was her first flight.
13 A cowboy hero of the silent films.
14 The Great Dictator.
2
‘No country for vile invaders’ feet’
LONDON, JULY 1940–SEPTEMBER 1940
Kiluna Farm, Manhasset,
Long Island, New York
July 1940
My darling Mummy and Papa,
I do hope you are well, happy and free from bombs. I am having a lovely time here. As I got up at 5.30 a.m. on Saturday the 13th I was so excited, and at about 6.30 passed Brooklyn, Ellis Island, New Jersey and the Statue of Liberty. It was so lovely, but as we were queuing up to have our passports, etc., examined, lots of reporters came on board. We kept them off for about twenty minutes but they knew I was there, and they were so persevering, getting me over the heads of the crowd that at last we were forced to surrender to them.