by Diana Cooper
Friday was a horrid day. At 9 a.m. the siren went and was followed immediately by a bombardment of guns. I was out of bed and halfway down the stairs in a flash because I heard above the blast and shock of the guns an approaching thunder of squadrons of aeroplanes that could only be German. Pam Berry had a room on the first floor so I sought sanctuary there and ate a couple of eggs and drank some coffee. They brought 133 down that day and I think I saw one being despatched to its death. I certainly saw a machine trailing a cloud of smoke, miles and miles above and obviously losing height. Later that day I was at Molyneux’s buying a dress to spend the entire winter in when the same thing happened again and down the lot of us scampered, very quickly too, into the basement. Bridget Paget who works there tells me that really and truly the alarms, sirens, bombs and guns do not affect her at all, at all. She sleeps alone in her house and sleeps through it all and has no sense of fear. She ought not to be working at Molyneux in that case but sitting instead in the tail of a bomber and getting bars to a V.C. We came down here12 to get a rest from the raids for two nights, but as bad luck would have it, the brutes concentrated on Surrey last night and the droning of their infernal machines kept me awake most of the night and bombs fell right and left without however doing much damage.
I have such acute bombitis of the ears now that if my inside rumbles I jump out of my skin and think it’s air activity, which indeed it is.
I got a lovely letter from you (the second from school). You sounded cheerful and happy, and I love you for it. There’ll be bad moments for you. There are bound to be. Bear with them, for they get right. Send postcards to the Paleys and to Kaetchen. Are you allowed a typewriter at school – if so ask Kaetchen to send you a cheap one at my expense.
You can’t think how much I love you.
October 1st, 1940
I’ve had a wonderful letter from Nanny all about your school. What a good time they gave her but now she has left you, poor monster. It was very wrong of whoever told you that the Dorchester had been bombed. It was quite untrue. We’ve only had an incendiary bomb on the grass in front of it, which left a lot of black burn. It was said to have landed on the roof and been dealt with by the look-out man immediately, but incendiaries don’t count if there is someone there to bury them in sand, or anyway I could find no black patch anywhere.
Today, October 2nd, we moved down to the fourth floor and I shall feel safer in the daytime. At night I feel quite secure in the gym and sleep like a log. A man called Sir Hugh Seely had a birthday party on the first floor and we all got very merry and enjoyed ourselves. Tomorrow Maureen Stanley gives another one, and I’m quite looking forward to it. The guns bang in the daytime now, but that’s the only difference. At night Jerry isn’t quite so active in the centre of London. Sometimes the All Clear goes in the middle of the night and some idiots trudge up to their upstairs beds and get comfy only to be woken an hour later by a siren and trudge down again. I wish, I wish it was all over – Hitler defeated, the lights up again and the guns still.
October 3rd. I’m crippled with lumbago, which seems an additional fleabite to all the troubles. Maureen’s party was enjoyable enough. General Dill, the C.I.G.S. (Chief of Imperial General Staff), was there and I sat next Lord Halifax, who although I share the gym with him I seldom clap eye on. He was not very inspiring and told me all the things I know about Winston – how like a boy he is, etc. etc. He said too that he had read a telegram from Switzerland (I discovered later it came from Carl Buckhardt) describing the tortured state Hitler was in – moody and depressed, seeking always seclusion, antagonistic to his advisers, whom he now blamed for having turned him from his instincts and his astrological belief not to pit himself against England. It was encouraging to hear, but I seemed to have heard it very often before. Papa dined at the Other Club,13 which I don’t like because I hate him going about with the air thick with shrapnel. He won’t put his tin hat on. I do always when the guns are giving tongue. It looks awfully funny with a silver fox cape, but soon they’ll finish the modiste’s trade.
October 4th. I walk across the park now at 6.45 a.m., lumbago and all, past the Achilles statue. The railings are all down and the ground is deep in leaves that have fallen fast this year. It’s cold but it exhilarates me after a night below ground. I walk as far as our garage, and pick up Dodgems and go on to the Y.M.C.A. canteen. At 11.30 I come back and read the paper and letters, and go out to lunch. The days are terribly alike. I’ve brought the picture of Noona by Queen Victoria and myself by Sargent, and the wax bust of Nelson, and the ivory ship and two photographs of you and one of Noona, so the new room looks a bit more personal. Send me all the snaps you can and don’t marry before I see you again.
October 5th from Lavington. We came here last night and Papa has gone up to London for the day. It’s the same story – one comes away from the bombs, but they rain round one just the same in the country. This morning I went out with the mobile canteen to the airfield again, not Tangmere this time, another one. It’s lovely because the R.A.F. men rush the van and are jokey and grateful for hot teas and doughnuts, Mars bars and fruit gums. One whizzes round to lonely men sitting solitary in a pillbox with an anti-aircraft gun. ‘Me and my gun’s they are called, and it must be gloomy for them now and in winter it will be hell. One lot headed by a middle-aged Pole (now a Royal Engineer) has been put in a disused lunatic asylum, so the poor creatures are literally behind bars and we have to push the buns through the cage and shove the mug underneath through the wet grass. The Pole was a winner of the Davis Cup tennis at Wimbledon.
October 7th. Back in battered London. It is such a beautiful day. What is so disgusting about war is that when the sky is clear and peaceful and utterly heavenly, one says ‘We ought to get a lot down today.’ This time last year you had come for the first time to Westbury Manor and I was dreadfully unhappy in London pasting paper on windows, packing up treasures and thinking of America. Be happy and hard-working, be good and above all truthful, my darling John Julius. I had a letter from Dorothy Paley and one from the Doll14 and they both talk of you as John without the Julius. I do wish they wouldn’t.
October 10th, 1940
I’ve given up writing every day because my days are so horribly alike and dreary. They always start at 6.30 a.m. and now it’s pretty dark at that time. I don’t get home much before twelve and lunch with a friend. Sometimes a few bombs fall in the morning and that I dislike most. In the evening we dine with people or people dine with us, and Papa wears a face of utter and acute boredom and hates every minute of it. Then there is the night with Lord Halifax in the gym, and 6.30 begins the next. We go away Saturday to Monday to escape the bombs but generally get them just the same. This week we are going to a little house taken by Maureen Stanley west of Windsor. She says it’s very nice and very cheap and the only house in England not yet taken. There is obviously something very wrong with it. We shall see. I wonder whether you would notice very much difference in our part of London if you could see it. I think you might even be a bit disappointed in not seeing more devastation. When a house is hit it looks as bad as anything you can imagine – just matchwood and crumbles and feather-fans and loos still sticking to the wall of the next house, but no street looks the least demolished.
October 14th. Well, we saw what was the matter with Maureen’s house. It was practically on an airfield and a target for bombs. The first night three fell about half a mile away and shook me and the house to bits and last night one fell just outside in the lane and blew the whole of Maureen’s bow window away, and I, believe it or not, never woke. I’m thankful for it.
October 15th. Another shocking night in London last night. Hutchie arrived to take up his quarters in the Dorchester. His room bursts into my sitting room, so perhaps he’ll buck me up a bit. He certainly was bursting with buck at dinner last night. He’d had a tremendous drive through bombs and barrages from Liverpool Street to Park Lane. Piccadilly was blazing, he said, the Pavilion Theatre too and the Carlton Club. He seemed
to think it all most exciting, but it merely made me want to be sick. All afternoon I went round the demolished pieces of Pimlico and to schools and other buildings where homeless people are put till they can be billeted in other houses, or sent to the country. Mr. Coombs, Papa’s political agent, was my guide and spared me nothing. I was quite happy to talk to the people and hear their stories and wonder at their serenity and stand aghast at their sincere desire to stay in London and not be evacuated, but I didn’t see why I should have to look at the craters and the ruins. Mr. Coombs appeared to think it was a treat and probably you would have thought the same. The truth is I don’t like realities. I like dreams and snows and plans for the future and storybooks and music and jokes. Best of all though I love you and Papa and you are both realities, so my argument collapses.
You talk of my coming over, but I don’t see how I am to. God, how I should adore it. If only Lord Athlone would go home and Papa got made Governor General of Canada; you might start praying for that, though I can’t see what in the world would take Lord A. home.
Tuesday, October 14th, 1940
Hutchie has moved in and is a great solace to me. His chambers have been bombed, also the beautiful Middle Temple Hall. In this most exquisite room the first performance of Twelfth Night was given in front of Queen Elizabeth herself. Every day something beautiful is destroyed utterly. What can we do to stop it? I sent a telegram to Kaetchen, my traditional helper in all trouble. I told him to get a suggestion to the President that he should appeal to the Pope to advise the belligerents to cease from this idiotic bombing of capital cities, the demolition of which will gain neither capitulation nor advantage to either side. I know that Rome and the Vatican are particularly terrified of destruction of their national monuments. The Dorchester stands up well so far. The water flows well, whereas at Claridge’s no one has had a bath for a week. Gas is said to be off, but it is unnoticeable as they have substituted coal fires and the food is improved by it.
I can’t remember if I told you about my unfortunate experience when the Westminster Hospital asked me to run round and give a pint of my good red blood for transfusions for the wounded. Three months ago I did it at St. George’s with no pain and no trouble. This time they advanced upon my poor arm with a needle the size of a big blunt bodkin. I asked humbly if I was not to get a little injection of pain-killer first. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it only means two pricks instead of one.’ I did not dare insist. For more than a minute he shoved and pushed and thrust completely unsuccessfully to get the needle into my vein. The tears ran out of my eyes in torrents. ‘Does it really hurt so much?’ said the Dr. but I couldn’t answer for tears. At last he had to give it up saying that the vein had probably closed up after the last draining and he’d try again with another one in the same arm. I could just say ‘Couldn’t it be the other arm?’ and ‘Couldn’t I have a drop of novocaine?’ So I got it and all was well and he drew off what looked like a bottle of burgundy. He comforted my shame of breaking down by telling me that everybody’s nerves were very much affected by the raids and reacted quite differently to three months ago. Still my burgundy would be used that very night, so I felt it was well worth a flood of tears. Tonight I dined, none the worse, with Lord and Lady Willingdon – fine tough old birds out to S. America now on a mission, about sixty-five and seventy-three they are and they don’t give the bombs a thought. They came out to dinner tonight (one of the heaviest bombings we have borne) he in a white waistcoat and she in purple satin, and they sleep in their own beds in their own bedrooms – no tin hats, masks or fuss.
Wed. 17th. The canteen still has no gas or water and the frenzy of giving 400 men breakfast is pretty funny. There is a huge ‘hunter’s moon’ that lights my 6.45 walk. I look a bit queer and wish the moon wasn’t there to show me up – brown shoes, bare legs, the old blue Navy coat, old Enchantress cap with yacht-club badge in front, and only a spot of very slap-dash make-up applied in the dark for fear of waking Papa, who tumbles into bed the moment we get up from the gym to our own bedroom. He tries to keep his eyes shut all the way up.
I lunched with Barbara Rothschild. She told me of how she had given her parents a really good shelter, gas-proof, reinforced and equipped with beds and comforts. Shortly after they had taken it into use, Hutchie came to her and said ‘Um-m-m I want you to say something to Mary. I daren’t speak to her myself as she’ll fly into such a white rage, but really I can’t sleep in the shelter if she goes on snoring that way. She’s just like an old man.’ The same day Mary came with exactly the same complaint – she never got a wink because of the appalling snorting and snoring and gulping and porpoising that Hutchie kept up.
Thursday Oct. 17th. Last night I dined about fourteen strong and sat next the Free French Admiral Muselier – rather an attractive man, I thought, full of humour and interest. He looks a ruffian, very dark with a funny feathery growth of black fluff on his high bald forehead that gives him an unshaven appearance. All the French say he is a ruffian and a crook and everything else against him, but no Frenchman ever had a word of good to say of another one. De Gaulle has never spoken to him.
Wadey and I worked like blacks packing Papa’s books.15 No book shop would do it because they can’t use deal cases, so we are making paper parcels and packing them into a van and sending them direct to Belvoir (that is if the bombs give us a chance and a little time). Chapel Street still has its windows unbroken, though a large piece of shrapnel went through the skylight in the passage behind the library. None of my excellent ideas are accepted, and my latest is against these land mines which come down very slowly on parachutes. I suggest that they should put some very strong magnates [sic] in open spaces – parks and even squares to which they would be attracted. Perhaps it’s impossible.
Papa has just rung me up to say he’s dining at 10 Downing Street, which has put me into a fever of course, as it means the sirens will go any minute. It’s just seven so that he’ll have to drive home mid shot and shell. I talked to a huge Grenadier private soldier this morning at the canteen. I was laying ten tables against time and he liked the sound of his own voice. The outcome of it all was that he wished he was back fighting in France. He hadn’t been frightened there, but in London, boy oh boy, he couldn’t stand it. It made me feel quite heroic.
Friday October 18th Papa came home all right at about nine, as Winston dines at seven in a little blue sort of workman’s overall suit. He looks exactly like the good pig who built his house of bricks. It wasn’t a bad night because of mist and fog. It seems to have put them off a bit. Someone has urged indiscriminate bombing of Berlin, but Winston argued that ‘business should come before pleasure’. Conrad came up today and Venetia, and at five we are to go to Loelia Westminster’s so I’ve come to love a Friday and be terrified of something interfering with my departure.
October 19th. Ewhurst.16 We got here and O! the peace and O! the dear mists of October which cloak that revealing moon. We had a lovely night with hardly the buzz of a plane, but Papa got up early and went back to the front and came back at tea time. It’s hot and lovely and the woods are all copper and gold, and I went faggot-collecting and really felt quite serene for a few hours. I got my letter from you. I’d like to hear more troubles and who is nice and who is beastly and what you like most doing and what you hate most.
October 20th. A lovely summer’s day. I was able to enjoy it. In the evening the other guests played bridge and I went to bed early. The planes were buzzing unintermittently overhead and I got more and more lonely and more and more wishful for them to come up to bed. So I got up and crept along to the room over where they were playing and gave one tremendous jump. Instantaneous effect. One of them immediately came to the door, came upstairs and looked round to see if anything had been hit by an incendiary bomb. Finding all quiet, for I had scuttled back to bed, he went down again. I left it for a quarter of an hour and this time took the biggest jump safety would allow from the top of the table to the floor. That brought the lot up. I pretended to be asleep a
nd I heard Papa say ‘It was bombs. Diana is asleep.’ I never let on.
October 30th, 1940
I’ve neglected you this week, not because I haven’t loved you as much as ever but because my days have been so terribly taken up, canteening from dawn till lunch and packing Papa’s books in a hundred cardboard boxes all afternoon. I come in utterly exhausted, as the siren goes and just as I settle down to write the room fills with Hutchie who talks without drawing a breath. Phyllis looking funnier than ever now that the war allows her still more latitude in dress, Hubert,17 Maureen Stanley, Eve Curie, some Frog gentlemen. Jean Norton also exhausted from canteen work and asking for a bath, Baroness Bedbug asking for a drink, Bertram, a few journalists from America, etc. Papa has got such a sickener of the restaurant and insists now on dining upstairs in the sitting room with two or three guests. It’s awfully expensive and the guns bang away and make me jump. We’ve got four or five women dressed as real soldiers too – Monica Sheriffe18, Lady Carlisle, Violet Cripps, Mrs. Carnegie. One huge one is dressed as a Khaki Highlander with kilt and knees. Sometimes the place looks like a barrack of women.
At the weekend we got away to Ditchley and had a most difficult drive. First we started late and then found Western Avenue utterly jammed up on account of a bomb having just fallen on the bridge, so after endless detours the blackout came upon us. Then I missed the difficult turn off the high road and we got completely lost – no signposts, no light in the houses, no one but evacuees to ask, who of course couldn’t know the way. The climax came in the last lap through a forest – one couldn’t see the demarcation of the road and there was always the trunk of a tree looming up on the car bonnet. One curious new thing we saw – namely an enormous red light, like a timberyard on fire, lighting the whole sky and horizon. It would die down to nothing and then blaze up again in a sort of rhythm. When we came up near to it it turned out to be a sort of ten-foot-high lighthouse, sending up a blaze of red light every minute. Later we were told it was a mobile ‘decoy’ to lure German planes with.