by Diana Cooper
When we got off, Kaetchen was there on the dock, waiting. We were in New York only two hours and then we went to the Paleys. Mr. Paley has arranged for a tennis pro, Mr. Farrell, to come and teach me. He says I am very good indeed and that I shortly will be playing marvellous tennis.
Lots and lots of love,
John Julius
ON THEIR RETURN to London my parents ‘camped out’, as my mother put it, for three months in my grandmother’s old house at No. 34 Chapel Street. I’m not sure what had happened to Gower Street and why they didn’t move back there – Admiralty House, after all, was never going to be more than temporary. I can only assume that they had decided to sell it and finally to settle in Chapel Street instead; with its huge library it certainly had far more space for my father’s books. After my Easter holidays – spent with my mother at our seaside house near Bognor Regis1 in Sussex – I returned to Westbury Manor. Soon after the summer term began, however, it became clear to a good many of us that the young schoolmaster who had just arrived to teach us English was in fact a German spy. We took turns to keep a watch on him, and it was one evening when two of us were shadowing him to what was clearly the hiding place of his short-wave transmitter that I suddenly felt hideously sick and threw up in the bushes. On my return to the house I was found to be running a high temperature, and on the following day measles was diagnosed. Of the next fortnight I remember scarcely anything – which is a pity, since it means that I have totally forgotten the fall of France and the Dunkirk evacuation. Then one Sunday, when I was on my feet again but still shaky, my mother appeared and took me out to lunch at a hotel in Buckingham.
From the moment we sat down I could see that she was worried; at one moment I thought she was going to cry. Then she told me that I was being sent to America, and that I should be leaving in three days. My reaction was far from what she had expected. She had thought I would burst into uncontrollable tears, fling my arms round her neck and say I wanted to stay with her for ever; but no – for me, America was simply the most exciting place in the world. It meant New York and skyscrapers, and cowboys and Indians, and grizzly bears and hot dogs, and Hollywood, where I should at last meet my hero Errol Flynn. I couldn’t wait to be off. The next afternoon I was put on the train to London, and two nights later Nanny and I left Chapel Street on the first stage of our adventure – far more frightening for her than it was for me – first by train to Holyhead and thence on the night ferry to Dublin.
There, early the following morning, we were met by someone from the American Embassy and taken to breakfast with the Ambassador, Mr David Gray, an old friend of my parents. We were then bundled into another car and driven straight across Ireland – with the occasional stop for me to be sick – to Galway, where the gigantic SS Washington awaited us, the largest Stars and Stripes I have ever seen painted all over its hull in order to leave German U-boats in no doubt of its neutrality. We landed a week later in New York, whence we were driven to the house of Mr and Mrs William S. Paley, who had very kindly agreed to take care of me for as long as was necessary. Bill Paley was President of the Columbia Broadcasting System; his house on Long Island was not uncomfortable.
My father, meanwhile, was having a distinctly rough passage of his own. His old friend Winston Churchill, who in May 1940 had succeeded Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister, had appointed him to a new post which he had just invented, that of Minister of Information. The appointment was not a success. He alone had been responsible for arranging – in the teeth of violent Foreign Office opposition – for General de Gaulle to make his historic broadcast to the French nation after the fall of France; but the press, terrified of censorship and led by Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, mounted a virulent campaign against him, and the news that he was sending his son to safety in America provided them with just the ammunition they wanted.
Left to himself, my father would never have considered the idea for a second; but my mother was adamant. Was it not true, she argued, that hundreds – perhaps thousands – of other English children were being similarly evacuated in American ships? All the signs were that London would, over the next few months, be bombed to smithereens; alternatively, Hitler might at any moment invade. Would my father – whose name was among the top half-dozen on the Nazi hit list – ever forgive himself if his only son were killed – or, perhaps worse, taken hostage to ensure his father’s good behaviour? And so he allowed himself to be persuaded – with my mother in her present mood he had very little choice. There were one or two indignant questions in Parliament; but the Government had a few rather more important matters to concern itself with, and the storm soon blew itself out.
Within a few days of my departure my parents locked up Chapel Street – this was no time to begin all the trouble and expense of setting up in a new house, particularly if it was shortly to be bombed to bits. Instead they hunkered down for the winter in two rooms on the eighth – and top – floor of the Dorchester Hotel. They got them cheap, since few people were prepared to live so close to the roof.
The large London hotels were very popular during the earlier stages of the war. Their very size spelt a sort of safety; private houses were a good deal more vulnerable, besides being impossible to heat. Domestic staff were hard to find – nearly all had been swept up in the war effort. Moreover, commuting in wartime was a nightmare: buses and taxis were scarce, while the tube stations were themselves used as air raid shelters; everyone tried to sleep as near as possible to their place of work. Inevitably, different people favoured different hotels; but Claridge’s and the Ritz were relatively old and fragile buildings, while the Dorchester on the outbreak of war was only eight years old and appeared to be made entirely of concrete.
Like all her friends, my mother spent her days doing war work. At one time she was on the top floor of the Army & Navy Stores making camouflage nets; at another she was involved – I can’t remember how – with the distribution of gas masks; on yet other occasions she worked in canteens, sometimes for the forces, sometimes in factories or hospitals or the YMCA. The great thing, she used to say, was to keep busy – which she certainly did.
The Dorchester
July 5th, 1940
I’m going to try to write to you every day even if it’s only a scrap and even though it’s about things that won’t interest you a great deal. That way there will be a record of these hideous days and I shall feel I am in touch with you and you with me. You had rather a pale little face at the train window but I hoped that was excitement and not sadness. I went back to dinner with the parent Trees2 and talked about sinking and capturing the French Navy.3 Everyone is glad, even if some of them are horrified at the same time – horrified at firing on one’s allies the French. I did not feel horrified. It was vital that the Germans should not possess the strips to use against us and the French had broken every pledge in signing them away to their enemies. I woke sadly early this morning July 5, and thought about you hard. Phyllis4 looked in and Conrad on his way back to the farm to lift his last load of hay. Jones5 writes that they were nearly blown out of bed by five bombs falling on the beach. Soldiers are in possession of the long strip of grass along our sea front and are digging up the tamarisk hedge, for what purpose I forget, trenches or guns or a loo or what-not.
July 6th. I went to [censored, but I knew it was Rottingdean] this morning to see poor Maurice.6 He is half the size he used to be. A bright blue budgerigar sits on his shoulder always chattering into his ear, pecking his cheek and making little messes. He claims Dempsey (that’s his name) talks. I doubt it. I wasn’t allowed to drive along the front where the camouflaged six-inch guns are. Now we’re establishing ourselves in the Dorchester high up, for England, on the eighth floor. We can see all London beyond the green sea of Hyde Park.
When the parachutists land in their thousands they will probably be wearing battle dress indistinguishable from our own soldiers. The confusion ensuing is what they rely on to gain an advantage, so I was thinking all day in the train what one
could do to mark our own men. If they had armlets the Huns could take them off the dead or wounded ones and wear them themselves. The same would apply to any badge or flag. I suddenly thought of warpaint. Paint all our boys’ faces blue one day, scarlet the next, tiger stripes another day, or snow white. I don’t see how the enemy could catch up on that, so if you hear of it being done you will know that it was Mummy’s idea.7
July 7th. It’s rather lovely living at the Dorchester. Here 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 and a few preparations for sudden descent into the shelter. Wadey8 suggested that I should wear a particularly comic robe that I bought in America, and when I said ‘Oh no, I’d look too funny’ she said ‘I didn’t think you minded that.’
Conrad has had bombs ¾ of a mile from Mells. He’s stuck posts and wire all over his big field to stop aeroplanes landing – his own idea and at his own expense. I can’t understand why every soul in the country isn’t hammering or digging or drilling against the invasion. The Army and Navy and Air Force are hard at it but the ordinary countrymen and women don’t seem to do much. The tables are laden with food, taxis buzz about. Last war we never could get anything like petrol or meat or butter. We expect the greatest struggle ever known and possible catastrophe. We imagine it in every detail and in every horror, and yet we all seem as cool as cucumbers.
July 8th, 1940
Well my darling, I’ve just heard that you did not leave till Sunday afternoon.9 What a late date. I wonder if you stayed on in Dublin or waited on the ship. In the old days when the world was like home, we should have been able to wireless to each other every day, now the sea is silent for all but wrecks and disasters. I have remembered too that I never warned you about the press reporters, who will have swarmed on to the ship on your arrival in New York. I meant to tell you to avoid them if possible, and if brought face to face with them to say the minimum with the maximum civility. However, it’s too late now, though I cabled to Kaetchen to do his best. Reporters are nice boys if well treated, but I am fearful that English children arriving in the U.S. will be written up as indications that we expect to lose the war.
July 10th. This evening I dined with your old friend Mason10 who had got a famous writer called Somerset Maugham who had just landed from the south of France off a coaling ship with no water, no food, no loo, no nothings. He broadcast his ordeals but I didn’t hear it unfortunately. Papa tells me nothing. It’s been a grievance for twenty years. Today Venetia11 said ‘I love the letters I get from Duff. I always feel they are addressed to me personally, though of course “Dear Madam” gives it away.’ Only then did I learn that he sends a fortnightly letter to all people who by their position or profession see a great many other people, i.e. doctors, schoolmasters, clergymen, etc. I enclose one of them.
July 11th. A day of rage. All morning it was Mumble at Rottingdean, no lunch, debris-righting at Chapel Street. Exhausted and hungry I bought myself a strawberry ice cream at Gunters, also a strawberry tart in a paper frill, and took them to the house of Jimmy Sheean12 so that I might eat them in company there. I found a German. Now a lot of yesterday I had been wrestling with the police and the Prisoners of War department under which internees come, in a great struggle to get some unfortunates liberated. My heart was torn by the poor alien anti-Nazi women whose husbands have been interned, and who are as demented as I should be if Papa were taken and I left, not knowing sometimes where they are or if they will ever connect up with them again. However, after half an hour’s talk with the German so-called anti-Nazi man, I found myself wanting to intern him and all his kind for ever. He felt so violently against us for daring to intern him or any anti-Nazi and could not see that even though the innocent suffer temporarily we cannot risk a lot of the fifth column spies and Nazi propagandists sent as refugees to this country being at large, weaving insults to tangle us.
I left the house furious and when I got back to Dodgems13 what did I find but all the air gone from my tyres. I bawled for the policeman who I saw walking away rather fast. He came back sheepishly and I asked him what had caused him to be such a brute. ‘You should lock your doors,’ he replied. ‘If you will look at my doors you will see they have no locks. It’s a 1909 model,’ I said with pardonable exaggeration. ‘Try and start it,’ I said, ‘here is the ignition key, get in and try and start it.’ I had been to all the pains of taking out the distributor, which means plunging oneself into the engine and covering one’s clean summer dress with oleaginous muck.14 He apologised and looked guilty and ashamed, but that didn’t help me. I had to telephone a garage and get a man with a pump and there was no vengeance that I could take upon the policeman.
July 12th. A further rage day. I wake up to find my letter to you written a week ago returned to me by the Censorship Office, because I had denied a rumour which is what we are told to do. The rumour and its denial are also in the paper. The censorship comes under the M. of Information so I am the boss’s wife and wrote my name outside the envelope. I shan’t do that again because I suppose they think they will not be considered thorough if they let my letters pass. Again furious and with no redress. The letter will have missed the boat and you will think I have neglected you. I hope you will guess what the words are in the heavy blackouts. I went to lunch with Winston. There, instead of it being four or five of us which is what I’m used to and which is like a holiday on a mountain for me, I found a large spread, with a lot of people I don’t like at all, but the P.M. was his brave confident self and said that production was splendid and with America’s help – and it was coming over in mass – we won’t be beaten and we’ll save the world yet.
I still continue to get letters from you and Nanny from different parts of Ireland. Thank her very very much – her letters tell me just what I want to hear and are very sweet too. I think about you and wonder, wonder all the time.
July 14th. Quatorze juillet. On this day 150ish years ago the tyrannous Bastille fell and the Frogs thought they had won freedom for ever. Freedom takes a lot of maintenance. Yesterday I went to Ditchley and was greeted with the news of your arrival. Ronnie Tree had had a telegram from Jeremy. It was a real joy to hear of you in America and to picture Kaetchen on the dock, where I have so often seen his good dear face after long peering from the deck at the masses. Coalbox15 was there and Noël Coward and your great-aunt Norah Lindsay, and a beautiful American called David Bruce, and Bobbety and Betty Cranborne. The country, which one goes to for a rest, is so much noisier than London. The planes are deafening and always it may be an enemy one. No one quakes. It’s strange. One used to be told that the people in the Spanish Civil War got completely callous to the danger and I can believe it now.
The censorship had no more right to open my first letter to you than the policeman had to deflate my tyres. They have grovelled and in future I shall use the word parachutist when and how the fancy takes me. This morning I read with pride the enclosed cutting. You did very well, better than I would have no doubt.16
July 15th. Nothing happened today to amuse you or me. It rained in torrents and I got soaked to the skin in Dodgems because (a) it is not watertight and (b) I had to spend so long under the waterspout taking its appendix out. All the American journalists went to meet the Queen today.17 Jimmy Sheean did a big personal reconstruction and Mr. Stoneman – whom I call ‘Lava’ because he said all Europe will shortly be lava – bought a new shirt and had a shave and a shine. They fell for the plump little siren as all men do, and I hope after all their efforts they impressed her.
July 16th. Jones writes from Bognor that the military – the licentious soldiery – are making havoc at home. They broke into the house too, but Jones thinks took nothing. They steal cushions and mattresses chiefly and then books. I so sympathise with both these needs that I can’t resent their intrusions. I got a telegram from Raimund18 and one from Henri Bernstein and one from Dorothy Paley all saying they had seen you and that you were well and happy.
July 20th, 1940
The blow19 hasn’t fallen yet – it’s always to be next Tuesday or next weekend. Still, however, it is calm in London town and people go about their work and play with strong bright faces, and the inhabitants of the little houses that are blown to fine powder drink a glass of ale on the ruins. I saw this on the newsreel. I hope it’s seen over there. It’s an answer to those who say ‘You don’t realise.’ One realises all right if one’s house falls on top of one but one still smiles apparently, so why not smile before it falls? Great excitement as I write, the telephone rings and it is St. George’s Hospital telling me to come and give my blood. I’m thrilled and only hope I shan’t go green in the face and sweat with cold fear when the moment arrives.
July 21st, 1940
After lunch a lot of us went to Warner’s Theatre to see The Sea Hawk, with your admired Errol Flynn acting a privateer’s part. I expect you will have seen it. If not do, it’s rather your affair. Papa is having a rough passage in the press. They got it into their hysterical heads that he wanted to put a stricter censorship upon them. He never did, but they went off the deep end and attacked him on everything – on the Silent Column,20 and on you going to the U.S. Now that it is all settled and they know that they are not going to be muzzled and never were, they will think that their abuse and baiting have gained their point. It’s a hard life, politics, and one must have all the things in ‘If’.21 Papa has most of them and is unaffected by bludgeonings but your poor Mummy has none of them and is not unaffected.
I’ve just come back from the hospital minus a pint of my rich blue blood. I was shown into a fine empty ward and led to a bed surrounded by screens. Now being an old hospital bird, I know that screens are put round beds only for the gravest cases and death. So that gave me a bit of a gasp but having just had a nip of brandy I was feeling in good heart and in good tongue. A young doctor came and pinched my forearm, and another one a bit older said ‘How are her veins – nice and big?’ ‘No, I’m afraid they’re very small’ said the younger doctor. Now funnily enough I was glad they were small, in spite of the fact that being small they would less willingly release their blood. It sounded more charming, more graceful, more delicate, finer workmanship. Next they gave me an injection with a fine needle that doesn’t hurt of novocaine which numbs the spot. Then into my frail flesh was jabbed a needle the size of a skewer which turned into a rubber tube that ran into a pint bottle.