Darling Monster

by Diana Cooper

  I sent at once for the vet who pronounced it only superficial but agreed that milking was impossible. He produced a tiny bodkin – hollow – which he proceeded to put into the orifice through which the milk is squeezed, and let the milk flow through it into a jug. He told me I must do the same for a few days, which order paralysed me with fear of bungling the operation. However, I succeeded pretty well though an animal always recognises its doctor and is calm, but with me of course she was a frenzied demon and Jones used to hold her and I used to work away in the field, and the soldiers used to lean on the wall and roar with laughter when the goat giving a leap would upset Jones and me and the milk.

  It’s better now and the syringe is put away, but it’s still a job that needs a lot of patience, and is not really worth the time Jones and I give to it. He has to hold her head and because it’s so cold and I still wear a fur jacket and either she thinks I’m a billygoat or she just hates me anyway, she is always trying to give me a vicious bite over her shoulder. I only get four pints of milk daily and I ought to get six or eight. The milk is delicious, unrecognisable from the best cow’s milk, and it’s dreadful for Jones and the evacuees and Wadey to have to admit it’s good – and admit they have to, for fear I shall give them two separate glasses of each kind and challenge them to say which is ‘musty’, which is what they want it to be. The Joneses have been awfully clever in saying that it’s only when it’s cooked that it’s musty, but I’ll fool them yet and one morning send them goat instead of their cow’s milk. The Pig Family Hutchinson is in splendid fatness and should make me a nice profit and the country some fine bacon. I spend a lot of time asphyxiated by smell and bent double inside the old goat house, now the Hutchinson sleeping quarters, shovelling out the dung, and a lot more boiling up the swill which makes my mouth water.

  The hens are Wadey’s pride and her joy. One, our favourite, ‘Sussex’ by name, has gone broody which means that a mother’s instinct for children quite overcomes a bird and no sooner does she lay an egg than we greedies take it, she gets to a stage of sitting on nothing, hoping to hatch out imaginary eggs and laying none. The thing to do then is to buy her thirteen fertile eggs and let her hatch them out. I did this and in three weeks hope to have a covey of yellow fluffy chicks. Meanwhile we get eight, nine or ten eggs a day from the other eleven. But the success of all successes is the old Princess. She has settled down and crops the buttercups and stands quietly to be milked, tied slackly to the garden gate. She gives me between four and five gallons a day, and with that I can supply our own house, the evacuees and the Joneses. I can make a pound. of butter which more than covers our needs for a week, and also make about thirty pounds of cheese – good hard durable delicious cheese – a week, which really will help the country’s food problem in a minute way. I tasted the first one yesterday, made in early April, and I do not think it could have been better or more professional. If all goes well I shall write to the papers and do a broadcast at the end of the season demonstrating what can be done with one acre and a bit of hard work by hundreds of old maids and little families who have got £50 to buy the initial outlay with.

  £28 cow – 7 years

  £11 pigs and pen

  £9 hens

  £1.10.0 – 2nd hand henhouse

  £1.10.0 pail and milking stool

  Total: £51

  The food one can pay for as one goes along with profit from eggs and milk. But the English are set in their ways and if they’ve not done a thing before they don’t fancy it now. They’ll do anything dangerous. They’ll fire-fight and become men and women of warlike action, but gentle agricultural arts they don’t have any feeling about unless born or bred to it. To me it is full of glamour. The rotation is fascinating, drawing life out of the rich earth and that life returning its wealth to the earth by its manure, and the dovetailing of things. The pigs make the field yield more grass, the cow gives more milk in consequence, and therefore more whey, which the pigs lap up and fatten and manure the field again. I wish I knew more.

  Today comes the super-sensational news of the arrival in Scotland by parachute of Rudolf Hess (great friend of Chips). We none of us know yet what it portends but it may be a most encouraging indication. Do you remember The Flying Visit, a book by Peter Fleming that I told you the story of? It’s very reminiscent of it, isn’t it? My hand aches. It’s as broad as a navvy’s from milking. It aches at night and keeps me awake when the bombs don’t. They plastered Tangmere two nights ago, and I thought it was the garden they were plastering. Oggie was here last night and Venetia for the weekend. She still has forty children in her house and feeds them on parsnip jelly and reads Trollope aloud to them. Pam Berry came too. She laughed till her cheeks rained with tears when she saw me milking.

  May 21st, 1941

  Papa is ill and you can imagine the fuss I’m making. He has got a sort of flu-bronchial catarrh, green slush everywhere, and now the doctor here has put him on a drug called M & B which makes people want to be sick and commit suicide simultaneously. My usual tact deserted me when he said ‘You mustn’t catch it – who’ll run the farm if you are ill?’ and I said ‘O I shan’t be ill – people with something vitally important to do never are ill.’ O poor Papa, it does worry me so and makes me hate the animals and the swill and the cheese and the whole bag of tricks. One of the Princess’s teats has gone wrong and instead of a pure white spurt of milk appearing when squeezed, a nasty jet of café-au-lait comes out. So a friendly cowman is coming this morning to what he calls ‘give her a drench’, in other words purge her. I’m looking forward to that very much. Meanwhile he tells me to ‘strip her’, i.e. take what there is in that quarter away every hour, so I’m perpetually dashing over to the paddock and seizing the poor cow’s udder for a minute’s squeeze.

  The bees are there and operating well, judging from the industrious appearance of their front door. Mr. Butler of Bosham arrived with them and his wife – a mute moron with a black veil over her hideous face. I wore a black veil too over Conrad’s hat, quickly clapped on top of a white muslin headgear worn for cheese-making. You can imagine the sight. Conrad and Mr. Langmead, the intellectual farmer who happened to be calling, stood and watched the colonisation into the new hive, unveiled. Mr. Butler was unveiled also and ungloved, and he held the bees and smiled at them and talked to them and got stung repeatedly and thought as much or less of a bee-sting as we do of a midge-bite. Do you remember when you got stung on the Lake of Geneva, after an exceedingly dangerous crossing, lying under tarpaulins in a crazy boat? I think it was your birthday9 and you were good and brave about it.

  Everything went wrong the day Papa took to his bed. It was like a witch’s spell on the farm, and cow and goat yielded less, the cheese all curdled and couldn’t be vatted. The Hutchies squealed as though they had prevision of slaughter. Sussex the hen sitting on eleven eggs destroyed four of them with beak and claw. It’s like when Titania and Oberon quarrel, everything goes wrong in the rustic world. I went over to Mrs. Rank’s10 to ask her about doctors and found her in a dressing gown suffering from too late a night. Her daughter Pat had broken her ‘engagement’ to a man they all hated two days before, and the day before she’d married an entrancing sailor who I’d taken a great liking to there last week while he was courting her. I asked for Johnny11 and she told me he had a hangover from celebrating the wedding. Don’t start hangovers yet for pity’s sake. The battle rages in Crete. We are fighting without a right arm because of no R.A.F.

  May 31st, 1941

  Always your letters grow nicer. They speak more of coming home, which pleases me because, war or no war, as long as the hellish enemy is out of this green land, you must come back – I think when you are thirteen. Thirteen I feel to be an age of grown-upness when you can be no longer treated as a baby that must have bangs and alarms and disease and hunger kept from it. At thirteen you will feel perhaps that you must share in the struggles of other English boys who are here. By then, being more grown up, you will have something to say about wh
at your movements are to be. So, although it’s an odd year away, start thinking about it. Either we shall have won the war and everything will seem ecstatic, or we shall be still in a death grapple, in which case it will be intensely disagreeable. No fun, only want and stiff upper lips that never get licked, and heads held high in spite of dive-bombers and clothes scarce and no Long Island standards of pleasure and resources. Perhaps we’ll all be dressed by then like Rob. Crusoe – alias Alexander Selkirk. I shan’t be because I’ve always kept my fancy dress ball clothes, so can go on for years as a Velasquez, or Attila’s bride, or Mrs. Siddons or Lady Macbeth, or for the rest of my life in my old nun’s cloth.12 It won’t suit Papa to be shabby.

  With Billy Welfare13 we are practically self-sufficient here qua nourishment – eggs, butter, milk, honey, cheese. I don’t take meat, sugar or tea anyway. Potatoes, vegetables, nettles and prawns and lobster and chickens for the table – no bread or fruit. I am planting fruit trees this year but they won’t help us till the fifth year of the war.

  The news is always appalling but we still feel quite confident. Papa didn’t see Hess. No one has except underlings. He seems very like me, quite ignorant and with the single thought ‘Let me talk as man to man with the enemy, and he will see the folly of his ways and lay down his arms. We are bound to win and he is bound to lose. Why kill and destroy to prove a foregone conclusion?’ Just what I want to say to Hitler, but I’d have a suspicion that I wouldn’t be listened to whereas Hess thought we should listen, learn and inwardly digest and send him back with a godspeed and no flea in his ear. If he thought he was due for a bumping-off, he hasn’t said so, but I think that probability must have come into his flight. He was being watched and known to be so-called idealistic because he didn’t like general destruction.

  I’m so much happier here at Bognor. I must have been more acutely unhappy at the Dorchester than I realised. The roses are on the verge of blooming, the irises and poppies in flower, buttercups and daisies mask the grass fields, the Spitfires and Hurricanes whizz by in the high empyrean – a misty silver formation – but from the garden do not look hell-bent.

  The A.R.P. men stationed in one half of the stables have sent a complaint into Headquarters which was duly communicated to me. ‘Could Lady Diana remove her goat from her stables as they had to sleep in the harness room and didn’t like the smell?’ I had a happy loss of temper, unfortunately only on the telephone. I said it was a funny thing, but the goat had been complaining to me only that morning of the A.R.P. workers and that nannies didn’t smell but that I was going to get a couple of billies, if I could, and then they’d smell something, and that they ought to have a spell in London and smell burnt flesh or relieve men in Plymouth or Bristol instead of lying in a comfortable room for a few hours and smelling through their snores the smell that every farmer knows and loves because it’s a smell that means produce and wealth and nourishment. Sick they make me. I’ve begged them to find other quarters, but I bet they won’t as I charge no rent. They see me milking at 7.30 so they can’t think it’s a ladies’ plaything. I did enjoy myself.

  A fascinating weekend you seem to have spent among bush hogs and beaver-dams. If I could only get to Canada for a day or for one hug?

  June 14th, 1941

  So it’s holidays again. They seem to be no sooner over than they begin. Is Upper Canada College a bit cissy, that they break up for a trifle like chickenpox? Why, good old Egerton House didn’t disperse for measles, and would I think have held on united through the Black Death. I like to think of you with the Paleys and Kaetchen again, though I fear you’ll be a fearful ignoramus later on. It will suit me because I shall still be able to drill unnecessary information into you, and you won’t see me in my true dunce’s clothes. I rather suspect that Cat of having got you back, using spots as a lever. If such is the case he is a bad cat and must teach you, not his tricks, but the things he knows about that you and I don’t – figures, German, wisdom and worldly wisdom – very different things.

  I’m sitting on a deal box in the middle of the garden path that opens on to that lush good bit of grass outside both sides of the stables. I have dragged the Princess along to give her a change of herbage, but I have to sit here to stop her getting back to her old favourite corner in her own field where she is fond of standing knee-deep in wet dung she has collected herself.

  The khaki14 ducks by my side are preening themselves and making Donald noises. They have no water to swim in, just a tank to submerge their heads in. It is out of farm fashion to give ducks swimming space, and yet they have to keep those awful feet. It seems dreadfully cruel, like taking us off the snows but leaving our skis on. It’s the first summer day, the first without frost at night. Jones has brought the hammock out and Conrad and I will rock in it when he arrives this afternoon and look at the roses bursting into bloom hurriedly, and watch the bees making up for lost time. I have two hives now. Did I tell you of acting as assistant to the bee fancier at Bognor, Colonel Watson, when he came to open and examine my colonies? I had a veil over my face and elastic bands round my wrists, but I forgot my trouser legs like open chimneys. I thought I felt lots of bees crawling up them and attributed the sensation to my imagination, well known for its activity where horror is concerned. I didn’t dare complain to the old Colonel, so I carried on till I was stung on the thigh. I didn’t even mind that, but it made it clear that imagination was not all the trouble. So calmly and slowly, for one must do nothing spasmodic or hurried where bees are concerned, I took off my trousers and stood exposed in ridiculous pants, pink as flesh. Looking, I found the trousers lined with bees. It was a C. Chaplin scene.

  I feel I’ve told you of this incident before. My memory is my worst failing these days. War bombings have quite confused it. Papa, recovered, has been fighting like a tiger with tooth and claw and fist, trying to reform his impotent Ministry, but how much he will succeed is another matter. Anyway he’s enjoyed and is enjoying his Kampf.15 Jeremy [Hutchinson] wasn’t drowned, thank God, and has been made the father of a bouncing baby girl by his wife Peggy Ashcroft. Hutchie I see a lot of. He’s here now, only gone up for the day. He’s probably going to become a magistrate and sit in the courts and lecture the drunks and probably fine me for parking my car on his doorstep, and my! shan’t I cheek that magistrate if I get half a chance.

  My poor behind aches so from the deal box, however Her Highness is cropping away well now after standing for half an hour staring at me, with no comprehension of any kind in her eye. Your letters are my one big pleasure, though I have a lot of little ones in the farm. How to face the winter is what I try not to think about.

  June 25th, 1941

  How I neglect you. The truth is that I am never off my feet. Farming has got beyond me. The crisis of high summer gives me no time for lunch even. Every day more work crowds itself in. Someone gives me a cut field of grass if I will make it and that takes hours of time and pints of sweat. Then the Princess has been ill – rheumatic fever for three days which meant feeding her by hand and carrying pails to her. (She has recovered in consequence.) Cheese has to be made daily, as it’s too hot to keep the milk for alternate days. A glut of Dig for Victory vegetables has to be marketed in Bognor. The pigs are as big as ponies and nothing fills them and they knock me and kick me around, but thank God I take them to market on Wednesday and bring six tiny naked piglets of eight weeks whom I can nurse like Alice in Wonderland. Then all the bee-fanciers in the vicinity cluster round me to encourage my rather faint enthusiasm. They are all pretty odd and have generally spent their lives out East; though they have a free-masonry and help each other all they can, they really despise each other’s methods of handling bees and their ordering of the hives. My queen has done a bunk and a new virgin queen has been introduced with great application to tradition, pomp and etiquette by Colonel Watson, Mrs. Grey and me. I always get stung – last time on the tip of the nose – but I don’t mind at all.

  So the Russians are our allies,16 and to me it alters the c
omplexion of the war, maybe for the worse but in my mind to the good. People hate Russians because they are Communists and have done atrocious things to their own people and would like to convert us all to their highly unsuccessful ways, but I prefer Russians so infinitely to Huns and fear their creed so much less than Nazism that I have no swallowing gulping trouble over fighting on their side. Communism has at least an idealist aim – men are equal, no nations, no money, all races are brothers, share your cow with your neighbour because it belongs to the state, etc. I hope America will take it all right. They have a big Communist bogey which they maybe have more cause to have than us. We have none. A handful of rich people think the Nazis respect the positioned rich and that the Communists don’t, and they particularly want to hold on to their money. Never be caught by people who argue about Russia being worse than Germany – just consider if they are rich or poor.

  Your letters are much better written than mine and clearer in writing, phrasing and meaning. I saw you last in a dim station – it seems a hundred years ago.

  July 16th, 1941

  I’m very very fond of you and today it seems a possibility that I may see you before I dared to hope to. The Ministry of Information has become well-nigh impossible. It has no powers at all and all the blame, and Papa, while thinking it wrong to resign on discontent or pride alone, is far from happy with his position. Today in the papers are rumours of the changes (1) Papa to be Postmaster General, (2) Brendan to succeed Papa, (3) Papa to be given a post abroad. The first two are absolutely groundless.17 Papa couldn’t even be offered the P.M.G. ship. It would be too infra dig. But the third report has some foundations, and it might mean adventure and travel and even seeing my own darling son again. We’ll see. Meanwhile I try not to think about it but keep my mind rustic and turn my hay till 11 p.m.