Darling Monster

by Diana Cooper

  Next morning to the Middlesex Hospital to have diathermy on my poor leg. The receptionist had been so charming on the telephone that when I met her I had to tell her so. ‘Michael’, she answered, ‘had such a dreadful crossing to America.’ ‘But Michael who? I don’t know who you are.’ ‘I’m Juliet’s granddaughter.’53 All the ladies are in jobs of this kind so the standard of civility is very high. The girl who applies the diathermy is an angel and used to be at the Regent’s Park open-air school and left just as you came.54 She must be very young to be in charge of those spluttering infernal machines. Too late I got a telegram from Enid saying ‘Do catch 11 train to Oxford and see Timothy55 married. Back at 5.’ Imagine! Does this o’er-hasty marriage tell of seduction? We must not breathe it. The Cliffords would not go. The mother has relented, the father still too cross to say anything, the sisters not allowed to partake. Tucker56 led the bride up the Catholic aisle and gave her away. At 6.30 Timmy rang me from downstairs and asked to bring Pandora up. So charming they looked and young, she wreathed in smiles with a white bunny hat and muff and gardenia spray, quite bridal and touching in her happiness. They were off to the Savoy for the night and then to Rottingdean for a day or two and then digs in Oxford. Very romantic. Enid delighted. Poor Laurian had had to go to the Clifford house and pick the bride up and snatch her, rather, from the family clutch, but although she was warned not to get out of the car, she was invited in and civilly received.

  Now I’m going to dine with Emerald and a man at a restaurant. They will have been to a play while I have been writing to my dearest son and packing for my departure tomorrow. The retreat begins and will last three weeks. My luggage will cause laughter – one big white box of clothes, books, etc. etc., one huge black tin box of Conrad’s letters, one large black box of mine, one Foreign Office ‘bag’ stuffed with letters and books and clutching hands [spring clips], one attaché case, one zip bag. Write to me here. I’m a bit nervous of being wretched but I can always go if I don’t think it’s doing any good to my body or soul.

  Wednesday, January [27th], 1948

  [Droitwich Spa Health Farm]

  I’ve been here two days ‘enclosed in a nutshell’ for it’s no bigger – bright and flowery with hideous h. and c. and a very high hospital bed. I’m really curiously calm and happy and I believe it’s what I need – absolute cessation from strain, food, faces, drink, fluster. A pleasant, not dismal, lethargy has fallen upon me and I have not got out of bed to open those bulging F.O. bags and weighty deed boxes. I’ve lain in a coma and asked for a newspaper which I can never get. My diet is of the most filthy – the boiled scrap of fish, the scrape of marge on the lump of Ryvita, the tepid Contrexeville, the English salad without oil by order, but I don’t mind at all. I go to my diathermy every day and I believe in it because my knee is half the size, but is that due to rest? A pretty woman massages me with dismally lethargic fingers. I, who am used to my bright Parisian torturer, am contemptuous of this damp thing and would like to be rid of her. Sister is Irish and ever so robust.

  I’ve been issued a radio from ‘Welfare’. It only gets Home Service and that through a deep hum like the French put on to signal Hamlet’s ghost. I’ve just listened to the New World57 and picture too clearly you and me drumming our duets out in the salon vert and the pretty illustrated piano score you gave me. To go back to the B.B.C., they spoke to me at lunchtime about fertilisation and the birth of young. If only I had had you or Papa or David or Lulu to hear it with me. It was educational, not just salacious and the tone was the tone of The Children’s Hour. It took off on starfish – easy enough – sperm floating and meeting eggs. It dwelt on hens as a bridge and then took a deep decisive plunge into the mire of mammals. ‘Bears, dogs, cats, human beings, rats and so forth’ (humans were always a bit buried) ‘found it safer to have their eggs fertilised inside them’ (I consider this false, as a chick coming out of its carapace is far more advanced and perceptive than a puling babe). How is he going to get over this fence? I thought. No trouble whatsoever. ‘The sperm’, he said, ‘must be passed by the male to the female from an opening in the male body into an opening in the female. The male passage is called the penis.’ I never thought to hear that from Uncle Mac58 or whoever it was.

  I’ve read England Made Me by G. Greene – pretty good though not a patch, says Papa, on Stamboul Train – and I’ve read Maurice Baring by Laura Lovat, a book, I regret to say, less bad than I anticipated. Her little postscript, though too intimate in parts, I think well done for the unlearned and then there are so funny also exquisite poems – a few – and an unnecessary piece by Father Knox and another by Marthe Bibesco and Trenchard’s wonderful obituary that was in The Times, and three very familiar Rottingdean photographs – the whole beautifully printed on good paper. Now I’ve started on the new Sinclair Lewis called Kingsblood Royal and I wish I hadn’t because it doesn’t interest me. I’ve guessed the surprise point and yet I am obliged to finish it to its last typed dreg. Anyway the point of the cure is to make no effort till energy claims one.

  February 1st, 1948

  I loved hearing your little squeak on the telephone. A Hindu patient, female, has wailed in prayer for two nights for the Mahatma.59 When I think how all these big-wigs have cursed and ridiculed the old man, imprisoned him, considered him our great enemy and can now say the light has gone out. True, once India was handed back by the Old Queen’s grandson,60 Gandhi became a protecting power. Our Ali this morning quotes Bevin as saying that if the Labour Party had done nothing but give India to the Chutneys, that action would be enough to justify its existence. So don’t let’s have any talk of Tory misrule, they’ll be responsible for what happens now.

  The radio continues to occupy much of my time. I’ve tried hard with my pink eyes shut to appreciate Delius, Walton and Britten, our three musical glories, and I can’t get it at all. It’s slowness of ear, not because it’s nonsense as I consider Picasso to be. I’m sure they are real, but I’d have to hear the same pieces thirty times running. I must have a good set in my smallest sitting room, relayed to my bedroom.

  Most of the day I give to Conrad’s letters. I don’t think I can possibly do as Katherine asks and privately print a book of his letters and mine – mine are harmless enough, except that people would always get up from a browse minus their pants, but the wit of Conrad’s letters is all directed against K., Trim,61 the Catholic Church, all priests, his brother Claud, his sisters Diana and Flora. If I suppress all this plus tenderness to me there leaves nothing but farm news and money situation – wonderful bits about Daphne [Bath] but they would have to come straight out – far too indiscreet and bawdy.

  I eat nothing but very good Jaffa oranges, apples and a bit of dry cold meat sometimes, but as the place is run with no direction that I can see, sometimes the patients’ tray is brought to me and really! I wonder how it compares with yours. I’ve never tasted anything to compare with the vegetables and sauces – cloth and stale clothes the predominating flavour – and then the textures of the limp old fish and shredded bits of mince. I had an egg tonight. I always help the nurse to make my bed as it does help more than half, but she doesn’t remember to time my egg’s boiling and it was like a fives ball.

  Oh dear, there’s a terribly gloomy bit going on now about mine disasters and the noise of miners gurgling as they drown. I wish I knew whether it was more dangerous to fly or to mine. I bet flying kills more per capita.

  Did you read Balzac? Are you interested in him? I’ve bought a great quantity of cheap volumes of his works, some in English, most in French. Shall I send them on to you? You mustn’t whatever happens forget your croakings.62

  February 2nd, 1948

  I’ve got an appalling swelling on my eye – legacy of conjunctivitis. Is it a stye or an abcess? Half the white of the same eye is a lake of red – not like little veins but like blood in a stained-glass window. I’ll be a dainty dish to set before a King and Queen when we go to lunch at the Palace in the middle of the month. I forgot t
o mention that owing to the stye the lower lid hangs down hammock-wise. As to the knee, it’s sure to be arthritis, which cannot be cured. It may be fibritis [sic] which can be, but there doesn’t seem to be any means of finding out. It’s been X-rayed, but that’s a gesture like signing the visitors’ book. No report has come through yet. Ralph Richardson in Anna Karenina, you and I make the same noise with our joints, only my noises are involuntary. The place is odder and odder – no system at all. Last night I had four nightmares running, and took a sedative at 4.30. For the first time I’m woken at eight out of a precious though drugged sleep, with an enormous tray of breakfast – bread (not allowed), covered dish with stone-cold preserved egg lying on a chunk of grey sodden bread next to a pyramid of darker grey potatoes. ‘Is this for me?’ ‘Well, don’t you always have breakfast?’ ‘No, nurse, you know I don’t, only tea.’ ‘I thought you did.’ No apology and when I said it seemed absurd to drug with one hand and waken with another ‘Well, I’m busy with my breakfasts now.’

  I’ve been reading an account by me and Katherine Asquith of our tour camping in the Pyrenees. It isn’t particularly well written or at all amusing but for endurance and dash and courage, resource, vigour and redoubtableness. They’re not made like that any more, not even women. There’s not a take-off without two mules having to be found to drag the car into position. The steering gear breaks twice, and through it all we were always cooking our meals, not sandwiches and hard boileds but pans and fires.

  February 3rd. I’m going to speak to Papa in a minute. The ferry I hope to God has deposited him safe this morning on the white cliffs. I’m going to ask him to buy me a radio, portable. My mouth waters for the Third Programme and also for Dick Barton whom Evelyn (who condemns the discovery of sound waves and wouldn’t listen if war was declared) has now fallen for and as he has no set in London has to take a taxi to the Tablet offices to listen in. It’s an insanity.

  It’s 8.50 a.m. and I’ve just heard Sheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov in its entirety. Now who but me would listen to that at this hour? Perfect it was. Now it’s morning service, psalms being exquisitely sung. As soon as I hear that pure traditional music I’m transported to a particular vision and memory of childhood. There I am, kneeling in Rowsley63 village church in the front pew of the left aisle, staring for a good hour and a half at a neo-Gothic stained-glass window, four crudely coloured scenes from the life of Christ. The light shone through it to us over the tomb of my father’s mother – the Irish beauty Miss Marley, who died at about twenty-three. She lies there in marble on her elaborate Gothic base with a marble baby in her arms – the cause of her death – and a heavy wrought-iron gate between her and us. We could only see the top of her rose-crowned head and her baby’s marble pate and her symmetrical toes a bit further on.

  Mr. Parmenter took the service in a fresh surplice and a brilliant scarlet shot-silk hood hanging down his back. (‘Oxford’, they said.) There were wilting dahlias in little brass vases in the deep windowsills and at Harvest Thanksgiving the place was well stocked with rather poor fruit and meagre corn sheaves and always a pumpkin that one marvelled at. We had a scurry not to be late to start – endimanchés64 with Father in a hired fly.65 It stank of old wet stuffing; the windows pulled up and down, or didn’t, with a strap; and we hated it – bored, bored. Noona never made it and it bored Father pretty well too, I think, though he liked the talk with the locals at the lych gate on leaving the church. I was dressed aged eleven(?) in a fawn coat with highwayman’s capes to be like Martin Harvey in The Only Way and a wide-brimmed felt hat with silver galoon cockade (Franz Hals) and in the winter a beret, not Basque but big and pulled forward to be like Holbein.

  I never remember applying myself to prayer or to listening. I was only wondering how much longer, O Lord, and also wondering if the wet negatives pinned on to a tape hung hammock-wise from our bedroom mantelshelf would be dry enough to print when we got home. All the Belvoir chapel hours are not evoked, from the fact I suppose that the choir composed of servants and husbands and wives of servants and the house guests was not a strong one or one to sing in harmony, unison or tune.

  Balzac’s life enthrals me and I’m reading Eugénie Grandet. Nothing to be nervous about, it’s very agreeable. Did you read about Danny Kaye’s hilarious success in London? I would have you know that hearing him for three minutes on the air – not a joke – I fell in love and wrote his name on a pad to remember to invite him when he comes to Paris.

  I’ve been going through the old papers and have fallen on an envelope of congratulations on your birth – an amusing hotch-potch of senders of the same words – Queen Mary, Chaliapin,66 Marconi,67 Willie Clarkson (famous theatrical costumier), Arnold Bennett.68 ‘Bravo Papa’ comes from John Astor and ‘Heartiest congrats, hope he will take his first piano lessons from me. Max Derewski’. Have you ever heard the name? It was one to conjure with.

  I’ve put all Conrad’s letters in order. They are alas not complete. There must be packets at Bognor or in Embassy corners. I have hardly touched my own, but I see no hope of making even a small collected volume for friends – too spiky, too intimate, too obscure because of catchwords and allusions, too sentimental. To expose that side would be a blast on my own trumpet.

  I’ve just been asked by Sibyl, the girl who sweeps with her hands but has feathers on her feet (Miss Mercury, she does all the commissions to the village – stamps, change, Radio Times and shampoo) to buy a raffle ticket for some ignoble English unfashioned nylons. I naturally took two for two shillings and never thought to ask the ‘good cause’. I hear now it’s for the ‘Garage Fund’. What could that mean? Day out for the chauffeur? Black market petrol? I must ask. I’ve got a very amusing packet of anonymous letters (love and hate) for you. I wish I’d kept more, I’ve had literally thousands. I found a cable offering me £15,000 for twelve weeks’ cinema contract from D. W. Griffith, the man who made the first gigantic pictures, Birth of a Nation etc. Why did I not accept? I suppose it was war – or did my nerve fail, or was it family veto? No date on the cable. And I’ve read the correspondence of Gustav Hamel, the first man I loved, an airman, Swede by origin, who fell into the Channel in his cardboard monoplane and whom London society, England and quite a slice of the world mourned. He was missing for days and days and during the period of anxiety before resignation set in big balls were postponed, friends wept in the street and Tommy Bouch69 wrote me a poem to comfort (I don’t know why I was felt to be the widow – I had very small cause). Also Papa wrote a beautiful poem published in The Times.

  All this immediately preceded the war. Juliet in her very sweet and idiotic way I remember saying ‘Nothing went right after Hamel was killed.’ It is difficult to say why he took the public imagination with such force. He was golden-curled and exceedingly modest and flying was new. But there was a Lindbergh popularity about him – before Lindbergh went bad70 – and Lindbergh wasn’t killed. Papa often flew with him – open to the winds – no covered cockpit, one passenger snuggled up as in a toboggan, looping the loop. It was the desire of my heart to go up but not allowed – and then they say people don’t change.71

  Then I read the few poor letters of Basil Hallam, another famous star, a gent (Charterhouse) who danced and sang at the Palace Theatre in high-class revues. With him I had a passionate walk-out. It happened through a very suspect American called George Moore. For several years before the war he had financed Sir John French, for love and admiration’s sake. He couldn’t have guessed that French would become Commander-in-Chief; apart from that, there was no gain for George Moore in the relationship. It was French who gained. Moore took a big mansion in Lancaster Gate – 94 – since demolished, where French lived. There, at the beginning of the war, he started dances for me. His love for me was obsessive. I loathed him. I couldn’t understand a word of his lingo. I was sickened by his physique, which was of a low, flat-footed Red Indian type. He had a wife whom he was divorcing in order to marry me. I was very young and couldn’t cope at all. He covered
me with presents, not one of which remains.

  Sister here tells me that she was brought up never to accept a present. O no, not even as a child were they allowed a box of chocolates from a visitor – bribery. And, worse, they might like the donor for that reason. Anyway Moore loaded me with gifts. He seemed immensely rich. There were white lilies twice a week (but a dozen bunches in wooden boxes to Belvoir) for about four years. There was a poodle, a gigantic sapphire said to have belonged to Catherine the Great, huge subscriptions to our Rutland Hospital72 and a monkey with a diamond waistband and gold chain (‘Armide’, a brute). All this had to be accepted. (Not difficult to accept, you’ll say, but I really did hate him.) He only once tried to kiss me, in a back room at one of his parties, and I made an earthquaking scene, left the house banging the door and complained to all my friends.

  His parties were given entirely for my friends, and were called when they started ‘Dances of Death’ because at the beginning of the war no one dreamt of being anything but in despair. (After the first few months all London began to dance, as soon as ‘leaves’ began from the front; these, unlike this war, were automatic every four or five months.) Then they were called ‘orgies’ which in a way they were. G. Moore was about forty I suppose, and would leave the invitations entirely to me – no chaperones the only rule, or at least no one old – no parents. Young marrieds counted as chaperones. The war had made the scale of party – in which all the mothers kept watch on their daughters and their partners from the dowagers’ benches – impossible, so if one could prove that young married people would be there it had to suffice the poor drearily staying at home mamas. So the riff-raff friends – a lot of bohemians (because Iris Tree and Nancy Cunard and I hunted in trios) used to roll up at nineish and dine at ten off fabulous exotics.