by Diana Cooper
Christmas will come this year in sweltering heat. The Sultan of Johore’s wife says she will give us a party round her swimming pool. Heat will be in the very sod. I went to see her this morning. They have a zoo, a little elephant that I was ragging, only about six years old and six foot high caught my flimsy skirt in his trunk through the bars, gave it a sort of twist as he might have done to a banana on a tree and proceeded to try and get me and it into his mouth. I had to pull with all my strength to free myself. It would have been dreadful loss of face if he’d torn it off me from the waist downwards – I wear practically nothing underneath. In these countries face is of enormous importance. Riches, power, success, and getting away with something, good show, getting the better of anybody or thing, inducing respect or (better) fear, all give you face but you lose it by falling down in every sense, by lack of dignity or control, being caught out in a lie, beaten in a bargain, ridicule, no savoir-faire.
I miss you, and I miss friends. Papa is more homesick than I am. He wants his club and his books. I entertained General Brooke-Popham, Commander-in-Chief, Far East, last night. He can be relied on to go to sleep directly after dinner, but stupidly I let him talk, instead of talking to him, and he stayed and stayed. I also had a Chinese couple, Mr. and Mrs. Kau, both completely speechless – it was dreadful.
From the Stratosphere
This letter may read a little tight, because Papa has just given me a big dollop of whisky. I was trembling with cold and fear. Beneath us I assume are the mountains that divide Burma from Siam, but I can see nothing whatever but white dense cloud – above and below. I think of how planes lose their bearings and their height and I panic a bit, especially when the old boat gives a drop into an air pocket and I feel we shall be spiked by a mountain top. It’s freezing cold however – we must be flying at a great height. We have been travelling round for a fortnight and covered so many countries, costumes, habits and languages that I often get very confused. Calcutta has been what I like least, the day shooting with the Viceroy what I like best. Sleeping in the splendour of the Viceregal tents I enjoyed. I felt as on a stage set for Julius Caesar, or the Field of the Cloth of Gold. I had a huge one, lined with printed linens, a large pole up the middle, as big as Kiluna’s piano room and double the height. Real bed, carpeted floor, lamp-lit and romantic, a full-sized bath made of rubber in a little annexe, also a revolting Indian loo (that has to be cleaned by human hands – ‘sweepers’ belonging to the ‘untouchable’ caste of India). I roamed out by my tent’s back door to try and avoid using this barbarity, but there were too many native policemen guarding the precarious life of the Viceroy for me to find the necessary privacy.
I loved too the 1,100 beaters bawling their lungs out as they tore down the hills, hurling rocks in front of them to arouse the game, and I adored the long ride home, three hours, half in a lovely sunset, then half in night’s darkness on a very narrow path often precipiced to one side. Our only light was a flickering oil lamp carried by a vague Indian. Papa nearly died of it. I was sorry that he suffered so, but it gave him an idea of what I feel all the time in a plane. Calcutta is filthy and cringing, hot and ugly, a disgrace to the British and to the Indians. At night the pavements and gutters are like a battlefield, covered with what looks like corpses. They won’t sleep anywhere but on the road. What saves the town in my eyes, though really it is too idiotic in a modern town, is the habit of allowing free range to holy bulls. Anybody can gain merit with their god if they acquire a bull, proclaim it sacred and put it completely unguarded and free on to the streets. So all over town you may see these beautiful beasts with humps on their backs, lying in the middle of the local Piccadilly, with all the traffic having to circle round their repose, or sitting like Ferdinand on the doorstep of the Bank or your own house, or helping themselves unrebuked from open stalls to the finest fruit and vegetables. India put a nasty taste in my mouth. Burma put a good one.
Hurrah! We’re out of that blinding zone of cloud and looking down I can see occasional peeps of the plains of Siam, and looking up a peep at a Dutchman’s pants.7 Yesterday we left Calcutta as the sun rose, and came to Rangoon at noon. In the afternoon an American called Porley took us in his private plane to a place called Toungloo, where a hundred voluntary American flying boys, and of course many more groundsmen, are being trained to go and fight for China. I was deeply moved by it. All for a cause not actually their own. They put on a demonstration for us of eighteen pursuit Curtis planes getting up off a small runway with five-second intervals. The jungle has been cleared to make a field, and billets and hospital and messrooms, and they looked brave and young and purposeful. We’re coming down now at Bangkok. We should get home to Singapore today. Maybe there will be a letter from you. I have not had one yet, but I’ve been away two weeks.
Melbourne
November 9th, 1941
I’m sitting in a deserted golf club, it’s raining, the others are playing golf and walking round. I saw the little tree-bears, nursing their babies on a swinging branch. They only eat eucalyptus leaves, from about three varieties of that tree of which there are at least a hundred. It’s very wise of them because no one can take them away as pets as they are too fastidious to eat anything else. There are also grotesque kangaroos hopping around, and emus that make a noise like a tin tom-tom, not with vocal cords but with some monstrous part of their stomachs. We flew from Singapore to Bali, coming down at Batavia (capital of Java) and Surabaya (naval port of Java). Bali is an island belonging to Holland of very famous unspoilt beauty. The natives are beautiful, tall and straight, with innocent radiant faces, and strong, well-built, well-covered bodies, naked (men and women) to the waist. Beautiful sarongs and head-dresses and flowers in their ears and hair and round their necks. We stayed in a perfect little collection of grass-made houses in a garden on the sea, half jungle and smelling of paradise.
After dinner a native dance was put on for us of such incomparable skill and sophistication of rhythm of utter beauty, danced to special Balinese instruments of wood and brass. I have never seen anything that ravished me more in the realms of travel, customs and art in dancing. Next morning we flew till dusk and reached our first foothold on Australian land – Darwin – a port on the north coast. The Antipodes perplex – all is reversed, sun, moon and stars, seasons and of course the south is cold and the north hot. There was not much to remember about Darwin except a lovely large very green frog inside the loo itself which meant that Papa and I dared not pull the plug for fear of meting it out a hideous fate. Luckily it jumped out in the night, which relieved us in more ways than one. Three thousand miles the next day, which brought us to Sydney after dark. During those fifteen hours I did not see one village, except the handful of houses round the two airfields we came down at to refuel. We were greeted by hundreds of flashlight cameras which completely blinded us, blindness added to that total deafness that so long a flight brings upon you, makes you feel not in the best form for selling yourself to the press.
November 21st, 1941
In the sky (as per) Australia to New Zealand
Papa and I have had a triumphal procession through Australia. They were crazy about us both, don’t ask me why. Everybody claimed relationship. People are very isolated and they suffer from a desire to be part of the old country, and therefore work out genealogies to form a link with the living English. Every hospital nurse who ever had to make my bed or tend and treat me seems to have settled in Australia, and hundreds of Belvoir, Knipton8 and Bognor men cropped up to talk about old times, which they remember very inaccurately. When you’ve done your relations and old times with nurses and old homes there aren’t any more people, because the whole continent is inhabited by fewer people than London is. Canberra (capital), Melbourne and Sydney are really all we’ve seen of Australia and a little bit of what they called outback, meaning country and sheep farms, only they’re called sheep stations. I wonder if one could bear to settle here. I think I could, given a bit of money so one could have a motor and a swim
ming pool and some ponies, and of course a farm, but I don’t know – only those who go there young can adjust themselves. I’ll stick I think to Europe or America, unless you come here and then I suppose I’ll have to come hobbling behind.
I’ve just been sitting up in the ‘conservatory’9 with the charming and beautiful young pilot. No sign of the Tasman Sea 20,000 feet below. Another four days covering N.Z. at a terrific speed and then back to Sydney and Singapore. I wonder if we’ll survive it. Papa is a wreck. He works dreadfully hard, speaking and broadcasting, and looking quite understandingly10 at factories and works. I work equally hard, but no public speaking. I did a broadcast. It cost me a lot in nerves and composition but when I came to my own feeble passage addressed to the English children in Australia, a whopping great lump closed up my throat and I simply couldn’t go on, wasn’t it humiliating? I cry easy you know. Do you remember reading aloud in far away days The Flying Classroom?11 I always had to keep stopping to blub. The radio professional sitting with me covered it somehow and I came in for a finish. Meanwhile two of the most revolting English schoolgirls – huge, fat sixteen-year-olds – were produced for me to see as examples. I thought they’d be golden-haired toddlers. The monsters were chosen, I suppose, because they bore the splendid names of Sylvia and Joyce Duff.
Later. I’m writing now from Christchurch, a town of the South Island of N.Z. Such a day yesterday. Your mother, I am surprised to be able to tell you, was not frightened and behaved unconcernedly. We left Auckland – in a bomber Hudson machine at about 9 a.m. for a three-hour flight to Christchurch. The weather was kind of ordinary – cloudy but calmish. At the end of three hours’ flying over a blanket of cotton wool, we were told we should be in in about ten minutes. I didn’t put faith in this information. The face and voice didn’t seem true. After an hour the clouds parted a bit, and I could see we were over the sea with no land anywhere. We knew then, Papa and I, that we were lost all right. Occasionally a pilot would tell us ‘we won’t be long now’, but with no conviction in his voice. After two hours of careering around very low on the water, they admitted that they had lost radio touch, and feared they would have to return to the N. Island (two hours back) – as landing without radio was impossible. I didn’t much like the sound of this because I didn’t dare to ask if the petrol would last. I looked surreptitiously round for a rubber boat, but saw none. After another half-hour of going northward we suddenly got in wireless touch and in another half-hour we had landed safe at Christchurch.
It is more English than the English here. Hedges, flowers the same, but the people think and dream and ask only of ‘Home’. It’s touching. A man called Sir Cyril Newall who was head of the R.A.F. in England during the Battle for Britain is Governor-General here. It must be cruelly dull in comparison, dull and remote and far from the fray. Another two days here at Wellington and then back to Sydney for a night and then back home (Singapore) which will take four flying days by Qantas Line, sleeping Townsville, Darwin, Surabaya (Java), Singapore. Look them out on the map and try and take an interest in the old birds. I wish you’d discover, you could in New York, how many miles I will have flown. I’ll put the names on the back of this.
MY PARENTS RETURNED to find Singapore at long last preparing for war, which was by now clearly imminent. On 7 December the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor; on the 10th their aircraft had sunk the two British warships Prince of Wales and Repulse; meanwhile they were advancing steadily southward down the Malay Peninsula, while Singapore suffered daily air raids.
It is far from certain that my father’s report, which had left Singapore with Tony Keswick on 1 November, had as yet been even considered by the British Government; it had certainly not been acted upon. Churchill now appointed him Resident Minister, with authority to form and chair a war cabinet; but it was an empty gesture – there was nothing to be done.
Early in January 1942, having taken over some of the secret work from the female secretaries who had already been evacuated, my mother deciphered a telegram informing my father that Sir Archibald Wavell had been appointed Supreme Commander in the South-West Pacific. This effectively meant that my father’s work in Singapore was at an end. It was confirmed on 7 January with a personal telegram from the Prime Minister: ‘You should at your convenience by whatever is the safest and most suitable route come home.’
They left Singapore on 13 January. Just one month later, on 15 February, Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Percival handed over the colony to the Japanese. In all British history, there has been no more abject, no more humiliating, surrender.
January 14th, 1942
Above Sumatra
It was all settled in a few days. When Winston and the President fixed up the new headquarters of the Generalissimo12 in Java, we were warned that Papa’s office might automatically finish, and after three days of suspense during which Papa mooched around with nothing to do (for the Heads of the Services were leaving and the Civil Defence he had entrusted to an Engineering Brigadier called Simson) the telegram came saying ‘Return home as soon as you can’. The Pacific Clipper route being finished, Manila, Guam, Wake (what a wonderful epic) having all gone we have to go back via goodness knows what to start with and then Calcutta, Karachi, Basra, Cairo. From Cairo it might be Malta, Gibraltar – or bang across the middle of Africa and up to Lisbon and so home. I’m dreadfully disappointed it is not to be by Canada. What can’t be helped must be endured, and anyway I think it is too early in the year for you to come home. We must see how we all stand when your next holidays come round. The Germans don’t look too healthy, and we don’t worry about the Wops, but these slit-eyed dwarfs from Japan are a pest. They raided us every night in Singapore, but never seriously.
Our start yesterday was rather exciting. We were due to leave at ten and put off till eleven. Scarcely had we got to the airport when the siren wailed, the guns banged, the bombs fell and Papa and I, two soldiers, Mr. Kao and Mr. Yey (both Chinks), Martin and Alex Newboult were shoved down a lift shaft made completely of glass. It was a death trap but, as good luck would have it, during the hour’s delay at home I said to the ‘boy’ – ‘Bring me a last gin sling.’ Of course he thought I’d said ‘large’ and he fixed me one the size for Gargantua so the whole raid seemed normal and pleasantly exciting to me. Hardly had the All Clear gone, and moves towards the flying boat were being made, when yell, moan, yell – over they came again. Back to the lift shaft for another half-hour. Then off as fast as we could get before the next wave. No time to discover what harm had been done. Rain and cloud enveloped us, which generally I hate but today we were all grateful to it, grateful even for the bumps and rolls that clouds enforce. We felt that they were veil and cover from the enemy.
For several days I had been feeling terribly at leaving Singapore and all our friends, just as things must worsen there. We had no choice – orders are orders – but Papa did an amazingly good job against obstructions from all sides to get the town and island on a better war footing, and as long as the C.-in-C. and the C.-in-C. of the Fleet were there, and as long as he was Resident Minister he had a certain power and authority, in fact quite a lot, being able at any time to wire home if the local government behaved too atrociously. Often it came to that, so they were frightened of him, but without those advantages he was powerless and we are dreadfully afraid it will slip back into the bad slothful hands of the Colonial Secretary, and the weak hands of the general in command and the sleepy griplessness of most of the civil servants. We have left a strong General Simmons as Commander of the Fortress who, since Papa forced martial law upon them, can, if he has the character, force his will over any civilian, and the Engineering Brigadier Simson to get on with shelters, rationing, better fire services and a million other things to protect civilians.
I don’t know why I write you all these internal troubles of Malaya. They have been preoccupying me a lot, that’s why – and much as I want to get home, it seems cowardly and will be thought cowardly by our enemies – the obstructing Victorian
money-grabbing idlers – to leave at this moment. I mustn’t think about it. To our surprise we flew due south to Batavia. There we thought the shelter preparations immensely superior to anything we have seen. We had dinner with Pownall and an air commander on his staff called Darvel. Wavell had gone back for the day to Singapore so that will hearten them I hope, though he’s got a wall eye that droops and is dreadfully deaf. He is no doubt a fine fellow, and Pownall, his Chief of Staff, certainly is.
Batavia was blacked out of all recognition – out of finding one’s way about one’s room, or reading or washing, and we had to get up long before dawn (four actually) and grope about as best we could. We are now sneaking up the outside S.W. coast of Sumatra with a nice wall of rocky mountains between us and the yellow perils. We came down at a port called Penang – tropically beautiful. I bought two pairs of native trousers – I needn’t tell you – and now we are up again and due to come down at a place called Sibolga, but no one knows if it has any accommodation or only grass huts, and coconuts for dinner. The next place would be a smart resort at the top northern end called Sabang, but our captain fears submarines and raiders once we turn the corner and head without protection up the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta. That gauntlet has to be run, Sabang or not.
In cities composed entirely of mixed populations – Chinese, Indians, Malays, Eurasians, etc., unless they feel that they are safer in town, in shelters, where food is and where masks can be got – they all desert their jobs at the first bomb and fly to the hills. It’s so utterly different to England and civilised places. These poor natives have no traditions and not much understanding, have never had war anywhere near them and don’t understand that they are cogs in a wheel which if it stops crushes them all. If in London the gas fitters, the electricians, the police, the firemen, the food sellers, the Post Office, the road repairers, the people who collect corpses and bury them, the drain experts, the transport people and what have you – all fled to the hills in Surrey, the Germans could have taken the place next day and taken with it disease and a demoralised, craven, defeated people. But these poor beasts here don’t have a Nelson to turn in his grave, nor a flag that generations have died to hold high, nor anything to make them face up to fear and sacrifice. So imagine what a problem it is.