Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  * Lord John Manners and his Friends, 1925.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Shades of the Prison-House

  I WAS becoming burdened by my apprehensions. They weighed against my happiness. At three I had feared prison bars when one went where trespassers will be prosecuted. I was learning anxiety. No one was teaching me. My mother concealed all her fears and sorrows, but the consciousness of destruction by disaster was defined and obsessive. Yet what might have frightened me with reason left me quite unapprehensive.

  Uncle Edward went to Sweden (one wonders why) and returned to Belvoir jerking with new exercises. Young and old were lined up in the drawing-room to be taught by the new addict the secret of physical well-being. Up and out and down swung their arms and round like cartwheels, touching toes and stretching for the stars. I did my best but not well because my arms would not be raised higher than my shoulders. It was noticed at last and caused consternation. So that was why I bent my head over my cup when drinking, and why I could not turn over the music page on the piano-rack. Was it why I was labelled “blunderbuss” and always tumbled and therefore had permanently scabs on nose and chin and knees? From that day I went to doctors, in memory it seems daily, and never to the same one twice. It was during this time that Letty saw my mother crying without restraint and reported it to me, telling me that she thought I was the cause. I do not remember having any fuss or fear about my health. I took it as children take most things, for normal, but then I did not know what the specialists were presaging—a sure and steady degeneration of muscles that would take me through paralysis to early death. My mother’s tears cannot have been of despair or resignation. Visiting doctors increased, dark consulting-rooms became part of the day’s progress and ended in a grand and embarrassing climax. A crowd of consultants sat in a ring of elders, crowding the gilded drawing-room, while I walked round the arena, naked as a worm and suffering. I was brought up to be a modest child. Those were the days of clothes and hats, three petticoats and no somersaults, and bathing in bathing-costumes. Exposing full nudity to these gentlemen made me unhappy enough still to remember it.

  Life changed from that hour. The fifth-floor nursery came down to the gilded drawing-room. No more was I to stagger up the stairs, very slowly and bent. In fact there were to be no more stairs at all, but instead a little chair in which I could be carried to the first floor. No more walks in the Park, only drives. No more lessons (I had had very few after Nanny’s cramming), but Mademoiselle must read more Bibliothèque Rose. The minimum exercise, no getting up in the morning, and Dr Coleman to come every day when the family was in London to treat me with galvanism. For several years I had treatment—a big box of plugs and wires and Ons and Offs and wet pads clamped upon me that I might tingle and jerk. I was never to be gainsaid and spoiling was the order. Suppose this treatment, devised by the great Professor Herb of Hamburg, did not work and my life were to end before my twentieth year, let it be the happiest of lives, crammed with indulgences and treats. It was fortunate that, having a nature that took everything as normal, I did not become unduly spoilt. I was given every encouragement. The grown-ups became slaves to my demands, fetching and carrying and rarely saying No.

  Since the age of two when I was taken to see Marie Tempest in The Geisha we went a lot to the theatre. We went to the pantomime too, at Christmas, to see Dan Leno and Herbert Campbell as very old Babes in the Wood, and fairies invisibly wired on tiptoe for flights through transformation gauzes. This was my father’s treat. My mother’s love of the beautiful in everything took us to Her Majesty’s Theatre for every production and repeatedly to all Shakespeare’s plays. We were a family brought up on both sides of the Beerbohm Trees’ velvet curtain. For ten years they ruled that theatre with a rod of magic. We were taken with the three Tree children—Viola, Felicity and Iris—to performances and rehearsals, as often as we liked, and were allowed to pester the actor-manager Tree (Mr Daddy to us) in his dressing-room. I do not think that he minded, though he had great occasion when we motley children plastered our faces with his grease-paint and bearded our baby chins with Henry VIII’s hair, slashed our arms with great Caesar’s blood and hee-hawed through Bottom’s head. Often we threw on cloaks and elbowed our way into the Forum to lend our ears, or found ourselves Ancients among the tents pitying gentlemen in England still abed.

  Even without these favours, like all children, we would have been inveterate dressers-up. At home we had the feather-and-flower box, the ribbon-and-lace drawer, the fur chest (very mothy), the stuffs—yard upon yard of dress-lengths for all times and seasons, plushes and chiffons, sprigged muslin and cloth of gold. All these precious reserves in time found their gay end in the dressing-up box, a huge wicker hamper, a cornucopia spilling out skirts and hats, a few yellow plaits for Wagner, helmets, swords, ballet-shoes, deer-stalkers, boas, Ophelia’s straws and flowers, jackboots, wimples and wigs.

  Musical comedies were allowed, if unvulgar. I remember being too young for The Belle of New York, though I could sing “Follow On.” Since my beatific infirmity I could command twice as many outings. I liked the thrill of night better than a matinée and so we went in the evenings. It meant extra sleep from tea to 7.30 and sometimes (before Henry V, I remember) being sick from excitement.

  Galvanism revived my muscles. It took several years of care and spoiling and dear Dr Coleman’s bribing presents. He came every morning to treat me. Mademoiselle whom I loved so well left, and horrid Fräulein Meminger came in her place. I wonder to this day how my mother set about finding those extraordinary people to whom she entrusted her children. In those days, unlike these, it was better to be good than beautiful. In fact in certain walks it was necessary to be ugly, with nothing more than dyed hair or a gold brooch to attract. Deborah Metzker was merciless and very unprepossessing. Nanny was both hard and hideous. Mademoiselle came to us, without one word of English or any recommendation, from a family in Toulouse via a situation in Tiflis. She actually had a passport, perpetually brought out as a curiosity to show children and even adults. Her nose had been broken across her face, so she did not look at all like other people. Who can have recommended her? She was a lovable woman of thirty. She loved us and read to us and weathered our loyalty to a lost Nanny, with no language to help her. She was proud of her figure and, after pressure, showed us her breasts. They were a great surprise to me. She would stroke her long well-shaped feet, saying “Ils sont très fins.” She had stories of Prince Dimitri and sleighs. She had a fur cap, and for best she used poudre de riz. She never had a holiday (Nanny did not have one in the seven years she was with us). She had no friend except the household. She left ostensibly to see the Paris Exhibition, promising to bring us back individual flying wings which she sincerely, I think, believed were on sale. She never came back. It must have been preconcerted, as my mother cried when she said goodbye to her at the garden gate. Why did she go?

  Where was Fräulein found? She was a criminal type, filthily dirty, with a monstrous greasy appearance. Letty was old enough at twelve to discriminate. There was no love between them, but I gave her all my affection. My mother disliked her. Why did she ever engage her? She had no idea of teaching or any accomplishment. She worked only at a pink silk blouse for herself with lace insertions, all the two years she was with us, and at making pink flannel nightdresses. She slept in the gilded drawing-room with what was then called the “article” drawn out from its modest underbed and stood between us. Into it she spat through the nights. If food was spilt at meals she mopped it up with our bath-sponges. A vile woman, she did her utmost to undermine our trust in our parents and the schoolroom. It all came to a bad end, for when at long last dismissed she barricaded herself in the disused nurseries. Three months’ notice was her right, so there was nothing to be done to evict her. Alone in the house, she cooked for herself on a spirit-lamp and wrote a scurrilous pamphlet about my mother. With her savings she had it privately printed and distributed all over London. I learnt this story when grown up (I never saw a c
opy of the libel) but thirty years later I found a thick packet of condolences and comfort addressed to my mother by friends and strangers to whom the despicable German had sent her venomous outpourings.

  So Fräulein went, and Mrs Page (“Podgie”) took us two into the schoolroom. Podgie made sense and very good sense. She was known to my mother as having brought up the beautiful Pamela Plowden and her sister. Pamela had lost her mother in India, where her father was a magistrate, and coming to London at eighteen almost lived in our house. My mother was to be a second mother to her. The South African war must have taken a bitter toll of Pamela’s admirers, for I can remember her often in tears and my mother saying “Someone has been killed in the war.” She afterwards married Lord Lytton (I was her bridesmaid, dressed as usual as a Vandyck) and she will, I hope, read on this page how in my young and therefore critical eyes she was the most beautiful creature on earth.

  So Podgie was known and Podgie was very pretty, prematurely white with a winsome sensitive face, a forceful character and a cultured adventurous mind. Browning she loved, and Bernard Shaw and the Fabians, and The Dream of Gerontius. She had ideas of right and wrong. Although Mademoiselle and Fräulein had considered her a hypocritical fiend, it had made no difference to our acceptance of translation to the schoolroom.

  The Boer War was over. It had meant nothing to me except learning to knit and crochet Balaclava helmets and comforters. I watched the C.I.V.s march back to London, sitting high on my father’s shoulder and being swept down St James’s Street to Mr Willie Milligan’s room in Pall Mall. I think that Queen Victoria was receiving them under my very eyes but I can’t see where. I saw her receive General Buller too in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace, and we often saw the little black bundle, with its minute black parasol against sun or drizzle, driving through the Park in a victoria. I saw her Diamond Jubilee from the same room in Pall Mall, as always a black bundle, but that day set in a glorious panoply of Life Guards and Gurkhas and drawn by her flesh-coloured horses ornate with caparisons. I did not see her funeral. We must have been at Belvoir and—worse—we were not allowed black, a great disappointment as many other children were plunged into it. We had to wait nine years to don Court mourning.

  Nothing much was done about my education. Mademoiselle had left me with a smattering of French, on which unimproved I have managed to keep talking for ten years in France. She only tutoyéd me, so that when I came to the diplomatic life in Algiers and Paris I talked to General de Gaulle and the Government and the Académie Française as though they were intimates, children or inferiors.

  In Nanny’s day I learnt a ridiculous poem which started:

  He lifted the golden cup from the board;

  It sparkled with purple wealth.

  He pressed the brim her lip had kissed

  And drank to his lady’s health.

  My mother thought it common, so my next poem was in her better taste but equally unsuitable from my lisping lips:

  Come live with me and be my love

  And we will all the pleasures prove.

  When I was seven and Nanny was on her first and eternal holiday I slept in my mother’s room and in the early mornings she would teach me by heart the easy “Road to Mandalay,” the difficult “How they brought the Good News” and the dirgeful “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.” But the poetic rot set in again when Mademoiselle came. She taught me:

  O petit doigt de ma maman,

  Je t’aime bien—va!

  Mais de grâce ne lui dit pas ce que se passe.

  My mother thought it appalling. After Shakespeare she loved Browning (naturally not the complete works) and a lot of Tennyson. Our Christmas presents were always a volume of a Shakespeare series of little books illustrated by Byam Shaw, or a slim illustrated volume of The Idylls of the King.

  There was a lot of reading aloud and to oneself too. After Stumps and the Pilgrim’s Progress there were fairy books in all their colours of red and blue, violet, yellow and even brown, with the imaginative Ford illustrations which I thought the world of, as I do still. They were probably my first artistic appreciation. Next came stories from Spenser’s Faerie Queene and a book of Flaxman’s drawings for the Odyssey, followed by Church’s Homer and Kingsley’s Heroes. These gave me romance and names to drop. Historical stories were in demand. In The Little Duke I remember always crying over the death of Carloman. Comedy was never encouraged by my mother and I believed utterly in her, my oracle. We did not care for Alice. The Just-So Stories passed muster. My father’s reading aloud The Jungle Book was a little beyond me, but being by a long way the youngest I was used to treading water and pretending to be cleverer than I was. This lack of confidence, this clear-eyed assessment of myself, and worse this hunted feeling of being discovered and exposed, was certainly one of the shadows closing in.

  Everything we read aloud was too old for me, but I struggled and gave an impression of understanding. Reading was really all the education I was given. Arithmetic faded out with my muscles and to this day I do not know the process of division. Subtraction and multiplication are fearful obstacles. Adding is all right, I think. We had learnt no word of German from the loathsome Fräulein Meminger. Geography was considered as unnecessary as Exports and Industries. Latin, the use of the globes, the acquiring of algebra, ancient or modern philosophy—all such branches of learning were undreamed of in our curriculum; so were domestic science, cooking, preserving, and the rest. The piano was practised, drawing and clay-modelling were encouraged as a game, and we would sew and embroider in wools and silks and ribbons, making our dreadful Christmas presents of sachets and velvet holders of shot to act as my father’s paperweights.

  My sister Marjorie was undoubtedly a genius, and now that we were schoolroom children and the feuds over, I could begin to realise her gifts. Nothing was artistically denied her. She could draw like Holbein, and sing like no other amateur of her generation. She embroidered as artists painted. She imitated with professional brilliance and her taste was of surprising originality. So gradually she came to be my exemplar. Any feeling I have for art or taste in colour and form, in music and in literature, was given me first by my mother and with more abundance by Marjorie. Humour came from Marjorie—my mother, while appreciating fun, did not depend upon it. She could do without. She loathed the ugly, the comic caricatures, the grotesque toys, the red noses. A cap-and-bells jester must be an exquisite, not a hunchback. She would have hated Groucho Marx and perhaps loved Harpo for a wistfulness or a line of jaw or neck. No knockabouts or jack-in-the-boxes for her. “Nasty common things,” she would say detachedly.

  A great many things were “common,” even tomatoes and lemon as flavouring, and dyed fur, holding hands or grown-ups being seasick, and kissing with one’s mouth instead of cheek to cheek like a symbolic accolade. She hated funny books. Fairy stories must be ogreless and not German. Germany on the whole (Prussia rather) was common, except its music and Wagner in particular. Our cradles were rocked to Wagner motifs. An often-evoked scene is that of my mother sitting at a very large “grand,” puzzling out scores of The Ring or Tristan (Lohengrin and Tannhäuser were verging on the common). She was no virtuoso but could read from sight adequately and derive a world of joy for herself and for me, and as a girl (as I was told by musical faddists like Mr Arthur Balfour) she could sing Lieder and old songs and ballads like no other.

  My mother had great beauty. She was tall and frail with a complexion as delicate as the palest anemone. Her hair was just auburn and she wore a cloudy fringe like Sarah Bernhardt and a classical handle of hair pinned where the Grecians pinned theirs. Once she cut it short to be like Ellen Terry. Her dressing had, I imagine, never changed. She was forty when my eyes first realised her. She had in her day despised fashionable bustles. She was greenery-yallery rather than the Duchess of Towers, with very high-heeled pointed shoes, with buckles, to increase her height, beautiful slim legs and ankles, a small waist drawn tightly into a silver-buckled petersham belt, a creamy flimsy open-neck
ed shirt, free-wristed, with numberless little cream lace scarves draped round her neck and elbows. Always a sprig of bay was pinned high up to her neck by a green enamel tortoise. In London for out-of-doors there were faced-cloth clothes (greenish-greyish-bluish-fawnish) with tabs and smoky flat pearl buttons, and three-cornered hats with panaches of cocks’ feathers.

  For the big evenings, great balls or dinners I would be taken, wrapped in an eiderdown, to see her. I remember black tulle over moonlight-blue, and flesh-pink satin stuck over with sequins or bunches of rosebuds, always the creation of some little dressmaker, never Paquin or Worth. The noble family tiara was worn back to front, holding up the Grecian handle of hair. Nothing was used for its true purpose. The diamond eighteen-inch waistbelt that had sparkled at great London houses, when the beautiful Duchesses of Devonshire and Rutland laced themselves mercilessly to achieve the smallest waist, was divided into two pieces and formed her shoulder-straps. Nell Gwynn’s Lely pearl necklace hung in a festoon between two sensational diamond drop ear-rings from her shoulder. Diamond butterflies, bows, dragonflies and daggers sparkled about her bosom. Many fell and were lost and found, or not found. There was the diamond Garter star convertible into a necklace, which was worn on the nape of her neck, and the diamond words Honi soit qui mal y pense she pinned where the fancy prompted her. My father was not at that time a Knight of that Order.