Darling Monster

by Diana Cooper

  Jan 15th. Sibolga was quite a success and the most beautiful almost land-locked bay imaginable and unpolluted by man, as Captain Cook doubtless saw it. There was a hotel but it was thought better for us to stay on a trim little Dutch steamer that had put in that morning, so we did. It was clean, in fact luxurious, and we dined sumptuously with the two good grave dull Dutch captains, and talked of the Indies, and of hatred of Germany which they feel as fiercely about, or perhaps more fiercely, than we do, since Rotterdam’s destruction can never be forgiven. They have done better than anyone in this Far Eastern war so far. Their organisation everywhere for defence and alternative trade and air routes is superlatively good. They have something of the Germans – an efficiency – but in every other way they are not like Huns.

  We took off again this a.m. at the gentleman’s hour of eight and are flying north to the Andaman Islands. Halfway we turned round – a half circle – and nobody noticed it but me. I’m all too perceptive on a plane. The sky had clouded over splendidly – from the enemy aircraft point of view – but visibility and cloud was very dense and I think our poor pioneering Captain was lost. Anyway he turned due south for an hour, found an island, and turned again, I suppose having got his bearings, and on we went in the direction desired.

  Feb 1st. It’s a long time later and we’ve got to Cairo. I wanted to send you a cable, but they won’t put date or source of reception. It’s not much good. I might have put ‘Cleopatra sends kisses’, or ‘Too-ra-loo from Tut’ but you might not have known what I meant and the enemy eavesdropper might have, and we don’t want our destination and plans of flight advertised to Messerschmitts.

  There is a route to U.S. from here so I’ll send this off quick and start writing a new one. I long now to be home and plan ways and means to get you back as a farm hand.

  January 16th

  Never a dull minute.13 We arrived at the penal settlement of Port Blair, Andaman Islands, at about three. I took a hearty dislike to it. No gentle Malays and intelligent Chinese, only surly filthy Indians and bad Burmen, criminals to a man though freed, and with their crimes written large on their faces. Another airliner came in from Rangoon and the west and disgorged three Australian officers. There seemed little plan and no action. At last we piled into two small motor-craft and spluttered off through high seas to Ross Island, some thirty minutes away. Ross is the select patch where the Chief Commissioner has a residency. There is a barracks, a post office, a club, a church and parsonage, a village institute and that’s about all except for an old Circuit Home lately turned into a rest-house for air-travellers. On the quay of this little settlement, now evacuated on account of the war, stood the strangest old rickshaw-for-two that ever I saw, equivalent to the Irish bankrupt’s buggy. It had six slutty-looking Indian jailbirds, with filthy torn white shorts and different shades of faded carmine tops and turbans, to draw it up a stiffish but very short hill. A quiet, unassuming gentleman in shabby European tropical get-up said ‘My name is Waterfall. Do get into the buggy. I thought it better to lodge you in my house. I’m not living there myself. I’m afraid the light is cut off and we’ll see if we can’t forage up some tea. I’m afraid we have no kitchen. I thought we’d dine on the other island with the Colonel and the Captain.’

  The house was indescribable, very large and wandery and shapeless, with strange devil-carvings mixed with suburban taste. A huge haunted bedroom (‘No mosquitoes on Ross’, so un-netted beds), the inevitable plumbing horrors of India and an impossible trickle from a cold tap dripping into a pan-bath. We messed around and suggested looking at the flowerless garden, clinging to our hats and skirts that the wind was skittish with, while time would not pass. Dinner, he said, was on the other side at 8.30. One couldn’t wash, one couldn’t even go to the loo for very shame. I suggested dining at eight and we listened to a croaking portable wireless. I’m only interested in Singapore, and there was no news of it. We crossed over by launch. Daylight was fading. We listened to the radio again in the Colonel’s melancholy house, and a brilliant suggestion was made that we should move to the club and hear the radio there. This was welcomed as a time-killer, so we buggied over, the Chief Commissioner going as always on foot, and listened for the third time to the meatless programme of news. Still there was whisky at the club and some boys and even a woman not yet evacuated. There are only three left.

  Then back to the Colonel’s house and dinner and port, and a snub from the Chief Commissioner when I said that India was an unhappy country, and he said that I hadn’t seen it and was talking about things I didn’t know anything about. He was right, of course, but I was only describing my impression. That got the Colonel and the Captain winking and on my side, and cheered things up a little. The excuse of being woken at 5 a.m. allowed us to beat a difficult retreat across a troubled sea in a bit of a launch at about 9.30. The Chief Commissioner waved us off with relief, and we groped our way up in inky darkness to our inky house, empty but for ourselves, two witch’s cats and and three speechless Indian delinquents. After a struggle with washing and a stinking lamp we slept, but I was as usual eaten mercilessly by mosquitoes. No protection, no net, no artillery of Flit.14 I chucked it at four and somehow lit and tended the lamp.

  At 5.30, when I was dressed and packed, the three Indians padded into the room patting their stomachs and saying a lot. No means of understanding. I knew it couldn’t mean breakfast and there was a tone of alarm. Duff slept, cheek on folded hands, through this babel. At last the word Circuit Home emerged from the gibberish, so seizing my torch I ran down to the Circuit Home, to find that our pilot was at death’s door, 104 temperature,15 swollen painful glands in the groin. The rough, tough, jolly lady-doctor Thornton who had joined our flying-boat at Batavia was well in charge and diagnosed it as something I had never heard of belonging to the malarial school. It was a body-blow. Praying that Duff would have got a move on and be shaving, but unable to explain my absence, I went with the eastbound (already late) Australians in the launch to their Clipper, and got all the low-down about our near future. News wasn’t too bad. The First Officer of the eastbound aeroplane, in dual control with our First Officer, would pilot our ship, and a kind passenger R.A.F. boy would First-Officer the eastbound machine. Well, that’s better than another day in prison, though two underlings at the joysticks is not my ideal. I got home at eight and found the Circuit Home people having a gorgeous sausage-and-egg breakfast after a lovely night in fresh rooms with netted beds. The Chief Commissioner, from long dealings with the punishable, must have thought up something to irk us, i.e. almost solitary confinement in the dark with three murderer-keepers and no breakfast.

  A half-caste doctor, delighted to get a line from Dr. Thornton, proclaimed the Captain’s disease to be the same as had the first diagnoser, so he is to be got on the aeroplane somehow and left in a Calcutta hospital. A wonderful procession formed itself of passengers, coolies and luggage. The lady doctor, quite a lot grimier than yesterday, me with my nightcap on to keep the hair from the hurricane, and in the middle the septic pink-coated bearers carrying shoulder-high the Captain on his bed. His mattress laid on the floor of the launch, he was tossed across the bay and somehow squeezed through the narrow aperture into the aeroplane. The lowest officer and I dragged and unscrewed and pulled at the chairs and tables in the smallest compartment until we wrenched them free, and he lies there now, a sort of dying Nelson in the hold. Devoted officers fan him and I mop him with eau de Cologne, for the heat is intense when we are at sea level. The shocking truth is that I’m frightened of infection, more for Duff than for myself, and I dare not say so. How lucky are those who don’t think of every fatal eventuality.

  February 28th, 1942

  Well, my darling, we are back safe and sound and I am writing to you from Ditchley where to my surprise I found Jeremy Tree just arrived back from U.S., the size of an elephant but very charming. Our last bout of journey – Cairo to Malta, Malta – Lisbon and home – was very difficult. We stayed at the British Embassy in Cairo wit
h Sir Miles and Lady Lampson who were sweet and hospitable and kind but thought to be our hosts for only a few days. In the end we were living on them and boring them and leaving them and returning to them for nearly three weeks. The first plane that left two days after we arrived departed without us thanks to a Priority Committee refusing to let me travel on it. Papa all but had a stroke and telegraphed home for an overruling of the nonsense. This he got, but then no flying boat came in for a week and when it did, we were everlastingly told to stand down.

  At last the fateful night came, the final goodbyes made, the luggage locked and stored in the hold, Papa and me strapped in our chairs and all aboard for Malta. I tried to compose myself – difficult since it was to be a night flight through gunfire and enemy planes. However I managed it somehow, thanks partly to us sitting in total darkness, which I took to be part of the blackout bosh. I had fallen into a half sleep when Papa shook me sharply and said it was all off, and we must get out and go home. The airlines hate to give you information of any kind, but we gathered that it was the engines that just wouldn’t start, ‘something electrical’. I didn’t like the sound of all four engines depending on one thing.

  The next night we were off again – the same goodbye, paraphernalia and the last drinks, the blue pill, the friends on the quay, the already familiar shipmates. Again I composed myself to sleep as soon as we had taken off the Niles’s surface and everything seemed honkydonk. After about four hours (halfway in fact) I roused myself because I found a general unrest in the plane, too much vibration and passengers looking about them. A comfortable Scotch steward appeared next, looking a trifle green, and told us that orders were for everyone immediately to put on their lifebelts. These are part of your seat and have to be wrenched off the iron chair. We all obeyed, calm as cucumbers. I don’t remember feeling frightened. It seemed certain that we were going to abandon ship, because the steward then went up the emergency ladder and opened the trap doors above, but I felt a sort of confidence that we should bob about in the sea in a rubber boat or a raft or something, and I didn’t think of enemy submarines or ships picking us up and interning us for the duration, nor of the fact that a boat that size can’t land on anything but very smooth water, and we had no idea whether we were high up or low down or if it was calm or storm – so we waited very calmly. I was shifting things I thought I’d need out of my bag into my pocket and in about twenty minutes the officer looked in to say that the ‘situation has improved and we hope to get back to Alexandria’. So back we got, still in our life jackets, with the steward still at his post at the ladder’s foot, though I could not see how in our huge cork belts we should ever get through the half-crown-sized trap door.

  We got back to Alexandria and then back to Cairo at 5 a.m. to reappear like bad pennies at the Embassy. This time the engine had failed, and they had had to jettison, without much hope of getting the ship up again, all the petrol but enough to get her back to land. It worked, she rose again but it was a close thing. Then came two or three days’ pause which brought us to Friday, 13th February. Again the same start, the same half sleep, the same everything except that your poor mother’s apprehensions and nerves were not improving. All went well until 4 a.m. (we’d started at 9.30 p.m.) when we were told we’d be landing in a few minutes. ‘So soon. How wonderful!’ but no! it was old Cairo again. Despair. A few nights later we really did get off and crossed that nasty spot twixt Egypt and Malta where the Mediterranean is always, I feel, trying to drag me to its depths. It had tried to swallow the Enchantress and all but succeeded.

  Dawn was breaking as we got to Malta. Peeping through the blackout curtains I had seen quite a lot of gunfire, and as we landed the familiar screech of the siren was going full blast. It is a very beautiful, old, romantic city – gashed and battered a bit but not comparable with our cities’ ruin. The raid was on all day long but no one seemed to care much. We spent the day with Governor-General Dobbie, old, spartan, and in constant communion with God. No fuel therefore, no hot bath, a bitter shock to me as one descends pretty frozen from the upper air. Grace, before so-called meals, and TT [temperance] are house rules. The Governor Dobbie has the faith and heart of a saint and allows only rations on which no native can survive, Weevil-biscuits and Spam is the fare offered the high, though below stairs, said a visiting chauffeur, ‘I had a whole duck to meself.’ Dobbie’s custom is to take the guests up to the roof whenever the gunfire grows particularly active. It’s not the least dangerous, but cruelly cold and a long pull up of seventy steps, so I’m glad we were only in Malta for one day. We took off again as soon as dark – destination unknown.

  It turned out to be Lisbon. We gave Gibraltar a miss but I saw it blacker than the black sky with three tremendous searchlights shooting upwards. No enemy could miss its position. At Lisbon we were lucky indeed and caught a Dutch plane within an hour of landing which got us to England by four that day. I could not believe that we were really home. I don’t think I’d ever expected to be. The country looked black and freezing cold and the train to London was unheated and the town looked far more dilapidated than seven months ago – no paint, no railings, no glass, no maintenance but very moving and noble. Papa was like a child of ten, I a bit tearful. We are going to live in London till after Easter and then I shall be a farmer again, I hope. Mr. Mason has lent us his flat, 51 South Audley Street. Wadey and a char look after us. It’s Christmas cold and not in my style. Artistically it gets me down but mustn’t grumble, we are very lucky to live rent free.

  Captain Frend of the Enchantress has gone to U.S. to fetch a fighting ship over. He said he could bring you back if I liked. What do you think? It would be a tremendous adventure. About April or May I think he hopes to get off.

  The Fall of Singapore is one of the worst things – perhaps the worst that has befallen us. We’ll overcome it – in time – as long as America and the British Empire are indissoluble.

  * * *

  1 It was a long journey; the Clipper’s cruising speed was 188 mph.

  2 Her forty-ninth.

  3 From Noël Coward’s ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’.

  4 Welbeck Abbey – huge country house of the Duke of Portland.

  5 Thanks entirely to her morning lessons, I knew the capitals of nearly all the countries of the world by the time I was five.

  6 From Kipling’s ‘Mandalay’.

  7 Blue sky.

  8 A village near Belvoir.

  9 Cockpit.

  10 I.e. while understanding absolutely nothing.

  11 By Erich Kästner.

  12 General Wavell.

  13 My mother is back-tracking here. She sent off her previous letter as soon as she arrived in Cairo, but she had not yet had time to write the saga of the Andamans. She takes this up now in the letter that follows, written from Cairo.

  14 The most popular insecticide of the day.

  15 40º C.

  6

  ‘Locusts, thick as lightly fallen snow’

  ALGIERS, JANUARY–AUGUST 1944

  Eton

  Friday June 16th, 1944

  My darling Mummy and Papa,

  People are all wonderfully optimistic about the war now, and Eton is raving, completely obsessed by the second front.1 It seems to be going very well. What do you think about it, and what do the Free Frogs think, and what does Algiers think as a whole?

  I only discovered about it by accident. I was walking along the passage, and m’dame2 came up, and said ‘Well, what do you think about the invasion?’ I said, ‘I’m getting bored with waiting now, and getting also slightly doubtful as to whether it’ll come this month or not.’ ‘It’s started, though’ she said, in a voice of ecstasy, feeling, I suppose, overjoyed that here was someone to tell. My reaction to this was one of total disbelief. I said ‘No kiddin’ or slightly more sophisticated words to that effect. ‘No,’ she said, enjoying every moment of it, ‘it’s true’. I said ‘whoopee’ very sagely and severely, trying vainly not to start waltzing down the passage, then thanked
her for the news, and tore off to tell everybody. To my great annoyance everybody seemed to know, but I had a little fun confirming it to people who came up and said ‘Is it true . . .?’ Now I am trying desperately to get a map with flags to jab in. Dashwood has a beautiful one, but when I got to the shop they’d sold out.

  Lots of love,

  John Julius

  I DID INDEED return with Captain Frend, on HMS Phoebe, a cruiser. One April morning in 1942, at school in Toronto, I was summoned by Mr. Carson, the Senior Housemaster and told to pack. ‘You’re going home,’ he said. ‘But how?’ I asked, excited but mystified. ‘How should I know?’ he said. ‘There’s a war on, and in wartime everything is secret. My job is to get you on to the New York train tonight. You’ll be met tomorrow morning at Grand Central Station and told what to do.’ Kaetchen was indeed there to meet me – as he always was – with a ticket in his hand to Norfolk, Virginia. I caught the next train, and was met by a sub-lieutenant who took me to the ship. The crossing, alone, without a convoy, took a fortnight – there was much zig-zagging to avoid U-boats – but I arrived in Plymouth in early May and took the train to Bognor, where my parents were waiting on the platform.

  I spent that summer at Bognor. My mother ran her farm, my father commuted daily to London. He was now doing secret work, which included the planning of operations designed to mislead the enemy.3 Every afternoon I took a bus, gas mask at the ready, to a tutor in Chichester, cramming for the Common Entrance examination to Eton. I got in, and my parents drove me down on 15 September, my thirteenth birthday. My mother, characteristically, had included in my suitcase a long rope with a hook on the end as a precaution against fire. It was – as I had warned her it would be – instantly confiscated. I, of course, wrote home regularly; it would have been as much as my life was worth had I not. And so, I have absolutely no doubt, did she. But for the first fifteen months after my arrival, I am ashamed to report, there are no letters.