by Diana Cooper
Someone at the party said they had seen pipers piping downstairs, so a piper had to be sent for. Up he came – a god of beauty seven foot high, golden-haired, with skirts skirling, bonnet at a brave angle, ribbons flying and that appalling noise coming from the pigskin under his arm. Then everyone swoons and says there’s nothing like the pipes (there isn’t, thank God) and then someone always asks him to play the tune he’s just played and that doesn’t surprise him as it’s invariable, since no one can possibly recognise a tune on the bagpipes, or at best three notes of one that put the idea into their heads. So round and round the small room he tramped, sometimes slow, sometimes quick march, and then he played a reel and no one could dance it but me and Ann O’Neill so off the old girls swirled, and the weight lifted from my heart for a while. So maybe there is something to be said for the pipes after all.
We went to bed then, Papa and I, but the party went on for a bit and then the hostess took some friends down and goodbyed them into the street, and coming back at 3 she found the bearded missing link Ed. Stanley sitting in a heap with the piper also sitting and still piping, from a semi-inflated bag and drinking from a very empty whisky bottle. The new Lord Rothermere was screaming from an adjoining bedroom ‘Take that Scot Away’ so Edward dragged him off to a night club called the 400 where I hope they remained until the blackout was over. What a scene! Like Trinquillo [Trinculo] and Stephano in The Tempest. Meanwhile the old crowds were assembled round Eros in Piccadilly Circus doing the old stuff – ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with crossed hands – although you can’t see as much as a feather of his wing for the sandbags protecting him, and anyway it was as black as pitch. The nights that have no moon are so incredibly dark. I never get used to it. In the country where one is used to being out in the dark there is so much more sky than earth that always it seems to have some glow, but in a tall town the blackness can be blindness.
Jan 2nd. It’s cold as charity. I tore off in Dodgems to the tiny folly in Tring Park, which Victor has agreed to do up and rent to me if I will take all the trouble. I don’t know what to say. I could live there for £1 a week as against £15 here and I could feed myself and Papa on £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 making altogether £5 a week, instead of feeding and warming masses of people and letting the hotel wash us and water us and light us to bed which works out at £40 a week. What’s to be done with Wadey though? She’d be too lonely in the country with no companion. Send her to her sister, I think, and meet her in my London house once a week to get myself patched up. How does it all sound to you? Rather dull I expect, but I could run a communal feeding place or something in Tring all day and plant some onions and put the dinner on and what is more essential than all – pay the taxes which for the moment is utterly impossible – to meet them with 20 per cent is difficult.
Jan 3rd. We never sleep down now, raid or no raid, so Papa and I have ceased to quarrel. The days too should be getting longer though I can’t detect it yet. The snow is falling. I’m home from the canteen and writing to my darling little boy who I had a cable from yesterday. This afternoon I hope to go to Gilbert Russell’s till Monday. Tell that dear Christmas Katinka34 to shake her Russian slay [sic] bells and lick the cream off the bortsch from her whiskers, pick up her Fabergé pen and stop not writing to me at all.
Eve Curie and Bertram will bring you my love and England’s. Who are you sending home to me? H.G. Wells and Jimmy Sheean I’m hoping for. Ben Robertson is a darling. I hope you see him. He did the kindest deed, refused by all the other kind friends, in taking some of Noona’s drawings to Kaetchen, in the great hopes that he might sell some of them to the rich, i.e. Mary Pickford and Gertie Lawrence. The paper stops me. Write to me on a typewriter, my pretty citizen.
Dorchester Hotel
January 7th, 1941
It is snowing here – not nice crisp clean American snow, but dirty old bread and milk snow. It keeps the Huns away a bit, so mustn’t grumble but everybody’s falling on their behinds, no one with such a bump as me, so if we were undressed we should all look like mandrills.
We are all bursting with pride today on account of the Wops’ surrender at Bardia.35 Papa did a nice broadcast which you may or may not have heard.
Here’s a nice story David Niven told me about the exploit of a ‘Commando’. Commandos, you must know, are a new group of soldiers, very hush-hush, who operate with fleet and Air Arm no one quite knows where or how. Mr. Wu is one, so is Randy. Well, they settled that the enemy must be harried and if possible blown up in one of the Channel Isles. They had no idea how many soldiers and officers were in the garrison, so the first move was to send a single man to reconnoitre. Everyone volunteered, but Mr. Crosby (that is not his real name) a quiet little man of thirty-eight, was the most insistent. He said he had a plan and was confident of success. If he failed, they could always send someone else.
So off he started at dead of night, dressed believe it or not like an Englishman on the American stage, grey flannel trousers, loose tweed jacket and regimental tie. A submarine shot him up in a little rubber boat and he battled his way to the beach. In stockinged feet he crept to a gorse bush, where he hid till a reasonable morning hour. He then, looking smart as paint and just about as fresh, walked up to the German sentry at the gate and asked peremptorily to see the mess sergeant with a ‘Come on, man, I have no time to waste’ tone. (I forgot to say that one of the obstacles to his going was that he did not speak one word of German or French, French being the language of the Isles.) The sentry, bluffed, sent for someone who spoke English. The German who spoke English sent for the mess sergeant. Mr. Crosby civilly but firmly explained to the mess sergeant that the regiment, if they were employing M. Joubet as a caterer, were being sadly robbed. ‘M. Joubet robbed the English soldiers, and he will rob you worse. Now my firm is prepared to make you a very reasonable offer.’ The mess sergeant, naturally pleased, said he would like to have an estimate.
‘How many men?’ says Crosby. ‘Four hundred and eighty-two’, says the sergeant. ‘How many officers?’ asks Mr Crosby. ‘Thirty’, said the sergeant. ‘All at these barracks, or should I have to send in several directions?’ ‘All here’, says the sergeant. ‘I will let you have an estimate tomorrow’ says Mr. Crosby. He then goes back to his gorse bush, waits till night falls, puts his stockings over his boots, blows up his rubber boat and paddles into the darkness to be picked up by the faithful submarine. Isn’t it a nice story?
It is one o’clock and I am off to lunch with Winston. There is a blanket of snowy cloud and the guns are banging away very disagreeably. It may be the invasion but I doubt it.
Dorchester Hotel
January ?10th
I cried with laughter over Papa’s censored letter.36 It was like something you cut out for Christmas decorations. I never write to you without his telling me my letters are unintelligible, indecipherable and censorable, so my triumph over him is complete. I thought you forged his name with rather too much skill. Don’t get into the habit.
January 24th, 1941
I went and had dinner with Lord Beaverbrook the other night. He told somebody that I wasn’t at all suited to the Blitz, although I haven’t seen him since the bombs arrived. I knew him to be a bit scared himself and I thought he was delighting in the idea that there was somebody more scared, so this led me to write him a letter in which I said I knew it was no good asking him out at night, but that I would love to come round and dine with him in the evening. By great good fortune there was no bombardment that night, so I didn’t really appear very gallant. He has built himself a strongbox in the middle of the ruins of the Evening Standard offices. It is completely proof against everything, including air, though there is a little synthetic breathing material, mixed with something that helps his asthma, pumped in invisibly. It is enormous, with four or five bedrooms and baths, and generally splendatious. I can’t but like him, although he is a big bad wolf and will not remember that you are his
godson.
I have asked Mr. Wendell Willkie to dine with us. Will he, I wonder? I met him once. I shan’t know what to say because what will be on the tip of my tongue will be ‘I am so glad they didn’t elect you President.’ It is great fun, though, hearing people’s impressions of London when they first arrive. They vary a great deal, some thinking it a complete ruin, others noticing nothing unusual, just depending of course on their characters, like you and me. You would never notice any disasters and I have double vision of them.
February 5th, 1941
The other day in the big gun works in Grantham, where Ursula works, a bomb exploded and another one fell, unexploded, in a workshop. They sent for the bomb disposal expert and your old friend, poor Perry Brownlow, had to take him to inspect the bomb. Perry’s knees were shaking and his teeth chattering like castanets, while the expert knelt down with a stethoscope and applied it to the bomb’s lungs. He then got up and said he would like to go and think about it for half an hour. Perry offered him a drink, thinking he would say brandy, but he asked instead for a cup of tea. Half an hour later he went back and deftly removed the pin and the detonator, boiling hot, which he placed in Perry’s hands. He could scarcely hold them. The expert said every bomb is different and needs careful thought and diagnosis before dealing with it, like a human patient. When it was over, he asked for another cup of tea and went away thinking no more of it than we do of picking daisies.
London was excited and electrified by the Wendell Willkie visit. He has gone down like a dinner with the crowds. They shout and cheer and say ‘Tell them we can take it’ and ‘Send us everything you can!’ and this elephantine figure with a painted white tin helmet seems to amuse and impress them. I gave a dinner party for him, only ten of us in a private room in the Dorchester. He was treated like a king and a film star rolled into one, the papers told us what he ate for breakfast and what size boots he wore. Now he has gone. I waved him goodbye last night and pray God he will give a good account of this country and our needs and our hopes when he comes to testify in the Senate.
Victor and Barbara have behaved like unutterable beasts and have snatched my little house in the forest from me just as the builders were to move in. I was most cruelly disappointed and said so with tears and threats. This morning there seems to be a ray of hope – maybe they are remorseful.
We are all told to expect invasion. It’s difficult to imagine it. People like to say ‘I wish they’d come and get it over’ but I feel every day they don’t come brings us more help from America and Canada.
It’s bitter cold and snowy.
I knew when Kaetchen telegraphed asking me if I had received his letter of Nov. 14th that he had not written since. Isn’t he a beast? There is a lot to remind me of prison in living here now, especially for those like me who are used to travelling a lot, and one feels cruelly confined and the monotony and darkness and lack of art and theatre, so that letters from a bright continent and from one’s nearest and dearest are a great joy, so it’s beastly to be niggardly in writing to poor people doing time.
February 19th, 1941
Great excitement last weekend. We went to Ditchley where Winston was staying. Golly, what a to-do! To start with, the P.M. has a guard of fully equipped soldiers – two sentries at every door of the house to challenge you. I look very funny in the country these days in brightly coloured trousers, trapper’s fur jacket, Mexican boots and refugee headcloth, so that on leaving the house I grinned at the sentries and said ‘You will know me all right when I come back.’ However, when I did return, the guard, I suppose, had been changed. I grinned at what I took to be the same two soldiers and prepared brazenly to pass when I was confronted with two bayonets within an inch of my stomach. They thought, no doubt, that I was a mad German assassin out of a circus.
Winston does nearly all his work from his bed. It keeps him rested and young, but one does not see so much of him as in the old Bognor days. There is also a new reverence for so great a leader and that creates an atmosphere of slight embarrassment until late in the evening. Also instead of old friends the guests included people called D.M.O. and D.M.I (Director of Military Operations and Director of Military Intelligence) and an enchanting Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force, Sir Charles Portal, with a wizened little wife with whom I used to play as a child because she lived at Denton near Belvoir. Brendan of course was there and Venetia, and Winston’s wife and his daughter Mary.
Then on Sunday a flood of Poles rushed in – Sikorski, the President, and the Polish Ambassador and some other splendid Polaks. After lunch a little procession, headed by Winston, followed by the upstanding Poles and brought to a finish by your exceedingly reluctant and rather sleepy Papa, walked off to a private room for a conference on Polish publicity. It took an interminable time and when it ended and the Poles were due to move home the P.M. suddenly thought that the President should have a Guard of Honour. Secretaries and A.D.C.s went tearing about trying to find the Captain of the Guard, but he was sleeping or walking and could not be found, so Winston himself finally routed out some rather raw, inexperienced soldiers, who had never formed a Guard of Honour before. Meanwhile the patient Poles were sitting on the doorstep waiting for their Guard to arrive, and the President said: ‘Mr Churchill is so great a man that we must let him do what amuses him.’
I tried to remember things that the P.M. said to interest you, but my poor brain is like a sieve and I can only think of something he said which I thought very touching and disclaiming of his power. When I said that the best thing he had done was to give the people courage, he said ‘I never gave them courage, I was able to focus theirs.’
We had two lovely films after dinner – one was called Escape and the other was a very light comedy called Quiet Wedding. There were also several short reels from Papa’s Ministry. Winston managed to cry through all of them, including the comedy.
The days are getting longer very quickly – no blackout till seven and not dark until 7.30. They talk of making another summertime hour on top of the one we have kept all winter – that would mean it would not be dark in June till 11.15 p.m. (There goes the All Clear.) Crocuses in the park at the feet of black tree trunks, no railings left, a gigantic mound of rubble, bricks, beams and parts of demolished houses grows in bulk daily near Kensington Gardens. Enough rubble to build an Egyptian pyramid of. Perhaps they will – it would be a fine warning never again to trust Germans. We might insert a special brick or stone in every house that weathers the battle. If we forget for a moment after peace comes – they’ll do it again.
* * *
1 I dreaded birthdays as a child, finding them acutely embarrassing and hating being the centre of attention.
2 The house was in Queen Anne’s Gate.
3 This was the agreed signal for the expected invasion. A code word would be circulated by radio and all the church bells – silent since the beginning of the war – would start ringing.
4 Pamela Churchill, later Harriman.
5 Lord Beaverbrook’s mistress.
6 Lady Elizabeth von Hofmannsthal, married to Raimund (see Directory).
7 The Rutlands’ London house.
8 A chain of cheapish restaurants.
9 The Navy had landed at Dakar (Senegal) in an unsuccessful attempt to detach the local French authorities from their loyalty to Vichy France and get them to declare for de Gaulle.
10 Lord Halifax, Neville Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary.
11 Bertram Cruger, an American friend of my mother.
12 To Loelia Westminster’s house.
13 A political dining society founded in 1911 by Winston Churchill and F. E. Smith.
14 Iris Tree, my mother’s oldest friend (see Directory)
15 They were in the library of 34 Chapel Street.
16 A large house in Surrey. I am not sure who was living there at the time.
17 Hubert Duggan, her lover
18 Family friend, great lover of the Turf.
19 She and my father had spent Ch
ristmas with the Paleys during their American lecture tour.
20 Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate for the US Presidency in the 1940 election.
21 A rabidly anti-Semitic and pro-Axis Roman Catholic priest, whose weekly radio broadcasts were listened to by millions. At one time he was described as the second most important political figure in America.
22 Title of a then popular song.
23 British Ambassador in Washington.
24 My old preparatory school at 20 Dorset Square.
25 5 Belgrave Square.
26 Montagu, daughter of Venetia Montagu, one of my mother’s oldest friends, and inseparable friend of Mary Churchill.
27 Raimund von Hofmannsthal, an American citizen, had gone back to join the army, taking his wife Liz with him.
28 On 11–12 November British carrier-launched aircraft torpedoed the Italian fleet, at anchor in the harbour of Taranto. Italy lost half its capital ships in a single night.
29 A super-sophisticated re-creation of a Victorian music hall under Hungerford Bridge.
30 Helen Fitzgerald, a friend.
31 Jean Norton, close friend of Lord Beaverbrook.