by Diana Cooper
Among the British illuminati there were writers, actors, artists, composers, conductors – all of whom had to be given their own special party – musicians for Benjamin Britten, sculptors for Henry Moore, the stage for the Oliviers, poets and men of letters for T. S. Eliot. And, as always, fellow members of the Diplomatic Corps to be kept sweet. Then there were congresses of world scientists, football teams, the Salvation Army, SHAEF3 – who had their own clock and were always an hour late or early – whole queues of voluntary services – the WVS,4 the Mothers’ Union, or ENSA.5 Finally there were the provincial tours, perhaps the most exhausting of all, with endless lunches and receptions and dinners given by Mayors and Prefects and Chancellors of universities awarding my father honorary degrees. My mother always maintained that it was the most gruelling life she had ever led, far harder and more exhausting than being a hospital nurse or an actress or a farm worker.
What we all looked forward to was the Investitures, when my father had to award decorations, usually the King’s Medal for Courage, to the heroes and heroines of the Resistance. Most were humble men and women from the remotest areas of France, quite often simple peasants who had never before been to Paris. Some had sheltered escaped British prisoners of war for weeks until they could be taken across the Spanish border; others had slipped out at night to light landing strips for the tiny little aircraft that flew from England with weapons, radio equipment and undercover agents. Yet others had planted bombs under railway viaducts or blown up Nazi staff cars. Some had been arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, but had refused to speak and on release had instantly resumed their old activities. Eric Duncannon, my father’s secretary, would read their citations, his voice choking with emotion; then a small, frightened figure would step forward and my father would pin on the medal, tears pouring down his cheeks.
Some months after our arrival at the Embassy, my mother found a country house. I have already noted her life-long inability to resist a drive with an open gate. It chanced that this weakness led her, one afternoon in 1945, to a perfectly exquisite small eighteenth-century house, with a garden running down to the artificial lake that extends eastward from the Château de Chantilly. There was no sign of life, so she rang the bell. It turned out that the house was leased from the Institut de France by Bill Bullitt, the prewar American Ambassador to Paris. Bullitt happened to be still in France, now attached to SHAEF at Versailles; my mother telephoned him, and he confirmed that he had no further use for it. The transfer of lease was soon arranged, and the Château de Saint Firmin was to be ours, first as a weekend retreat and then as a permanent home, for the next fifteen years.
Paris
September 15th, 1944
It’s your birthday and we’ve sent a telegram but we don’t know how or when it gets to you. From the beginning now – after many many happy returns to you (fifteen years old – c’est formidable).
We rose in a moment – a beautiful machine that Dakota – swift and silent. I could recognise nothing of England till we came to the coast, and a dazzling white Beachy Head lapped by emerald waves then proclaimed itself; like an artistic poster for Albion it was, and I was moved, more moved than on crossing into France. Here we all dropped our books and papers and skinned our eyes for flying-bomb sites and shell holes and devastated towns. I’m bound to say I didn’t see a lot. The fields looked orderly and well cultivated, and the villages intact. I saw a lot of bomb craters concentrated in the centres of fields – lack of precision? Or something we are ignorant of? Soon we were circling over Paris itself – our fellow Dakota apparently motionless in the high air, and all around, dipping and diving and soaring like swallows, our forty-five escort Spitfires. Down we came to the little group of friends and diplomats knotted together on a completely bashed-up aerodrome. Victor was there.
We drove the twelve miles into Paris at a snail’s pace with a dozen police on motorcycles. The people in the street hearing the clatter mostly stopped and waved or raised their hats, and workmen in groups would even raise a cheer. This was encouraging to my rather feeble spirits. The streets were quite empty of traffic in the suburbs, except for an occasional army vehicle or a confusing orderless merry-go-round of bicycles ridden by women and girls with panniers on their mudguard generally carrying a biggish poodle trimmed to kill on the rack, and their heads, if not sporting the highest, most shapeless and ridiculous hats fashion ever produced, then trimmed to kill like the poodles with bows and roses stuck in.
This held good for the heart of Paris, but here are added in the Champs-Elysées a lot of very old horse fiacres waiting for custom but too expensive to hire. The streets are hung and the windows are dressed with Allied flags, but there seems no ray of gladness or gaiety in the atmosphere. No cinemas, no theatres on account of electricity or cafés or restaurants because of food, except fabulously expensive black-market ones – accounts for it I suppose. We laid a wreath without hesitation on the Unknown Soldier’s grave at the Arc de Triomphe. A good crowd had assembled in spite of it being the luncheon hour, and at two we got at last to our doss-down and where do you think it is? Our own old rooms at the Berkeley! Not a thing changed – the white-haired lady and all. It has been taken over by us for our staff and we have the first-floor rooms, nicer than before as there is no traffic noise and because you cannot get in for flowers – enormous millionaire baskets hanging over with enormous orchids (how do they grow them unless they have coal? I haven’t seen any in England for years) and flowers from government officials and old friends and shops wanting custom and hotels and collaborationists working their passage home, and still they come. Mostly what we were told to expect was wrong – it always is. In this hotel there is electric light always, hot water since yesterday, and delicious food, though too much of it – always juicy raw chateaubriands and chocolate éclairs of your own dreams. After lunch we went to look the Embassy over – it’s vast and makes my heart sink. I’ll tell about it next letter as if I don’t finish up with this one it will miss a bag.6
Paris
September 23rd, 1944
We moved into the Hotel Bristol in order to be grand and I’m not at all happy with the gloom and cold of Paris with no you, no Bognor, nothing much that I like except Papa. The pretty chestnut-windowed Berkeley was a solace and an old friend, only fifteen steps away from the street or the desk, and no passages, all compact and friendly. Now we have come to the vulgarest of two-storey flats seven floors up in an unreliable lift,7 passages and isolation and a ghastly expanse of hideosity, all so that we should have a private dining room and a bathroom each, with two basins in each, one for each hand and a third at chest height that can only be meant for vomiting. One is always warned of what isn’t true. I was told there would be no heat or light or food but it would be most exciting and interesting. Well, there are masses of all the commodities and beyond that drab dullness and nothing more.
I’m trying to get to Algiers to recover at least half of my luggage and household equipment, but S.H.A.E.F. as usual is doing all it can to impede, so we don’t get on at all – no linen, no china, no glass, no coal, no hope of getting into the Embassy. Papa goes and sees the torture chambers. They exist all over Paris – beyond belief horrible. The Huns put the men and women they thought could be made to talk in baths of iced water for hours, then in boxes made to sterilise clothes in that heat up to any temperature. They walled them up with their heads out, they hung them up by their arms and tied fifty kilos to their poor feet. They covered these rooms with the blood drawn from floggings and shootings. The walls of the cells are scrawled with messages, some warning newcomers who to mistrust among friends. One said ‘C’est ma fiancée 12 rue de . . . qui est la cause de ma mort.’8 Others wrote love doggerel verses. Very moving, isn’t it? A German said in the Metro as a woman clopped in on high stilt shoes like mine but more elaborate ‘to think that we meant them to go barefoot’. This explains the attitude of the Paris women in the occupation years – their grotesquely large hats hung with flowers and fruits and
feathers and ribbons, and their high carved wooden shoes were a long nose to the Boches, or anyway that’s what they say.
Raimund’s been running round for three or four days accompanied by an enormous 100 per cent Hun couple whom he dug out of the Portuguese Embassy where they were cowering. He finds it quite impossible to get them locked up and he daren’t let them go, so he’ll have them till the peace like an albatross round his neck.
Paris
November 14th, 1944
The great visit is over9 – all the preparations, all the fears and the excitements, but not the hangovers and not alas! the devastating cold I took at the ice-cold ceremonies. At first I thought to have the bunch lodged with us. O the scrubbing and repapering and furbishing and garnishing and testing for security. Then I drove down to Beaune with Bloggs to buy burgundy. The Hotel de la Poste where you and I and Kaetchen lodged (and where I got in a cross panic because you and K. disappeared in the morning’s starting-time and it was to buy me birthday presents. Dear dear Kaetchen I miss him so10) was closed and we had time only to find the wine merchant and be told that all was shut on Saturday and if we wanted the wine we must get it out of the cellars ourselves. Nothing nicer, so down to the depths we went armed with an iron trolley with holes for bottles in it, and what fun it was pulling the precious stuff out of its mould and penicillin and bringing it safely into the sunlight. Five dozen we brought up unlabelled – ‘très mal habillé, hélas’ the seller said ‘comme une belle femme avec une mauvaise toilette’.11
When I got home to Paris all plans had been altered. The party were to be guests of the Frog Government and were to live at the Quai d’Orsay. My disappointment was soon dissipated by relief and the thought that murder would be unlikely to occur in our house (‘What, in our house?’ said Macbeth hypocritically when Duncan was murdered). I went round to see the rooms prepared for them at the Palais. They had been blazed up for our King and Queen six years ago – vast and ugly, with two very dated bathrooms of gold and silver mosaics – aglow with indirectly lit crystal and pearls and fiddle-de-dees – Semiramis style and lovely I thought but much condemned by good-taste people. Goering had left his mark in the shape of a solid white china bathroom raying out infra-red and ultra-violet rays, everything in it too solid and massive for any bulk to break except the white American cloth (reinforced) on his rubbing table. He’s burst that all right. Also a dressing room large and cupboarded for a thousand uniforms and mirrors in plenty and odd bits such as a stool you might see at Daniel Neal’s12 on which the unfortunates who have to try tight shoes on to hot feet squat and boot you.
Never was a greater success, from the frozen hour when we awaited the arrival on the airfield to the moment when he left this house with de Gaulle at midnight for the ‘front’ at Besançon. Much fear of assassination from German snipers on roofs and Vichy monsters. Still M. Luizet, the Préfet de Police, made a magnificent job of keeping the Duckling in safety, and in not letting the defences show. When the King and Queen went to Paris you couldn’t see them for armoured men on armoured bicycles. This time the party looked unprotected, yet civilian guards armed to the teeth were in every window and sprinkled thickly into the crowds.
The first night we dined alone, meaning Edens, C.I.G.S.,13 a few secretaries, Alex Cadogan14 with the Duckling at the Quai d’Orsay. It was rather boring. Clemmie was sleepy and Winston, between Beatrice Eden and me, as difficult as he always is until the champagne has warmed him and until he has been able to draw the whole table into his influence. Two striving women, however beautiful or witty, are not enough, but after the feast, in the Napoleon III salon, with English whisky dropping on the exquisite Savonnerie carpet, his old magic took charge of us all as he weaved his slang and his pure English into a fantastic pattern.
Next morning your mother, dressed in a really fine suit of black cloth with monstrous collar of black fox and pockets of the same, took her place in the women’s tribune alongside Mesdames Churchill, de Gaulle, Catroux,15 Massigli,16 etc., etc. We were segregated from the men which irritated me, more especially because being on a line with their tribune we couldn’t see what was going on. The bands played, they all hoorayed, and the Great came up the Champs-Elysées in an open car – one so pink and benign, the other so sinister and elongated. Slowly they drove up to the Arc, did there whatever they had to do and then, the most dangerous moment, walked down again half a mile to their tribune from where, for an hour and a half, they watched the review of English, American and French troops, plus an endless detachment of pompiers17 which had played a big part in the liberation of Paris. By this time I was blue with cold. I got home shuddering, with pneumonia seeds well sown. Dinner with Wormwood that night, following on long conversations that had rippled along most successfully all afternoon. Dinner very different to our last grisly evening under that roof. Smiles now in place of quinces and vinegar, and Duckling as happy as happy could be – all axes buried – a new Renaissance of Love Relations. The Giraffe shall lie down with the Duck.
Next day Sunday I was too ill with ’flu to make luncheon with the Big Shots at the local F.O. so stayed in bed drugging and sweating till dinner time, when we had our staff of eighty assembled downstairs at 7.45 and a de Gaulle dinner of seventeen assembled upstairs at 8.15. Of course Duckling was half an hour late and came to the staff party as the General was arriving so I had to miss the lower party and the P.M. giving out the news that the Tirpitz had been sunk.
The rooms all candle-lit looked as beautiful and classically pure as I looked bloated and blotched with cold and veganin, but I got through it and could appreciate that it was very successful. We had the Bogos18 and Mr Caffrey, the U.S. Ambassador, and the Edens, and Vaniers19 and Bidault.20
March 12th, 1945
The days are boringly full. They won’t be when you come – only full of you. First we’ll go up to the front and visit the regiment that I heap with favours. I don’t know who we’ll take – Teddie21 perhaps. We shall have to do it grand and not in our own hobbledehoy style. Then we’ll see. The season is still cold and budless but there’s three weeks to go before the awaited day. Papa has got to visit some provincial towns so it might be Toulouse and Marseilles. We might combine with him. All to be settled when you come except the visit to the front, which is more or less fixed.
On Sunday a very queer convocation took place. At 5 o’clock all the princes of the Christian Churches, the present Roman alone excepted, arrived in sombre black at the Embassy and retired into Rosemary’s room, where beneath the smiling eye of a very young Queen Victoria they stripped and robed themselves into a true blazonry. There was the Bishop of Chichester, sober enough, and there were four or five dazzling gold Russians, and a few outrageous purple Archimandrakes [sic], all with beards and manes to their waists, and there was a distinguished Pasteur [sic] with clean Geneva bands, and uniformed Church and Salvation Army representatives. In our little Embassy church they preached and they prayed and they sang and they exhorted and they blessed in their several tongues and a choir of Russians warbled in the gallery, and our own dear choir of spinsters held their own in the chancel and then out they all filed again, unashamed of their startling feathers, these old clerical birds, down the Faubourg St. Honoré in broad daylight. The pedestrians were crossing themselves and gasping, the jeeps were crossing each other and gasping and gurking too. I never knew what occasion had called them together. We’d had the Bishop and Pasteur [of Huguenots] to lunch but the whole meal was too sticky and nervous for anything consecutive. I wasn’t prepossessed by the Bishop of Chichester and much prefer the Dean.
Chantilly
June 25th, 1945
I enjoyed your long leave22 very very much. Now you’ll be having Papa down. He goes to England June 30th for a week or ten days, and he’ll bring you all my love. We are installed now for weekends in our country home. It’s what the fairies told of – without fault – six bedrooms, three salons, one dining room, five bathrooms, a royal park as your garden, cascades and lakes.
Think hard about your summer holidays and talk to Papa about them. I think the beauty of this place, since it isn’t one’s home, might not be enough to amuse you. I think about July a lot. I’ve thought of a walking tour over some mountains with a donkey, or into Brittany or Switzerland. I’ve thought of a flying visit to Harold Balfour in West Africa to buy material. He has a private plane, but he lives in the White Man’s Grave and it will be the hottest time of the year. He passed through the other day and will be passing through again. I’ll consult him. There’s always Italy, if Bloggs is still there, or he may be here. We’ll see, but I like thinking and talking about it.
We’ve had a horrible night of atrocity films – I meant to ask all the collaborators, but only the English came who believe anyway. I went to bed sick and dejected and crippled with lumbago and feeling if only I could get to sleep I’d as soon not wake again. You mustn’t let me feel that way. I want to live to see who you marry and what sort of children you have and if you know how to be happy, and what work you do, and if it interests you, and if your wife doesn’t love you and help you, or if she deceives and bores and nags you and is generally the opposite of what you hoped from behind the bandage Love tied tightly across your eyes, I’ll strangle her or get her exiled, I promise.