Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  I enjoyed the months at Guy’s. V.A.D.s (it was the first month of their infancy and there were but two of us) were very well received. We dressed the same as the staff and were treated in exactly the same way. I was allowed to do everything the upper nurses were allowed, except dispensing, but in a few weeks I was giving injections, intravenous and saline, preparing for operations, cutting abscesses and once even saying prayers in Sister’s absence. In some respects I had an easier time than the first-and second-year probationers and more variety of work, as my rank changed with whatever nurse was off duty. There was no sweating at classes with examinations looming ahead. I could go to the lectures, but I was not eligible to enter for the examination. The first year took a lot of probationers off the list. The life was excessively hard if you were not very strong. Their feet and mine suffered intolerably. We were not allowed to sit down during working hours, so that it meant (meals excluded) eight solid hours on one’s feet, and a ninth hour walking the hospital.

  One could steal a minute or two in the kitchen, where there was a chair, also a cupboard of left-overs, cold creamy rice-pudding, cold chicken perhaps. Finding was eating. I was never a real martyr to my unseasoned feet, but some of them came to felt slippers, much disapproved of, and some to a day in bed. Often in the afternoons we would stand bandage-winding and rubbing plaster of Paris into open canvas bandages, padding splints, etc. The table was just wrong for all heights and one’s back ached as well as one’s feet. There was a perennial pleasure in leaving the ward for any form of mission. With a huge basket on my arm divided into squares for bottles, I might be sent to the dispensary. Oh, the “Sistering” that went on:

  “Please, Sister, Sister says can Sister Eyes let her have the lotion? Sister spoke to Sister this morning, but Sister hasn’t received it, Sister. Thank you, Sister!” It was great fun. I would linger and draw out my missions—“Sorry, Sister I couldn’t get Sister’s attention”—all the schoolboy wheezes. One could drag a mission out to twenty minutes. Later in the spring it was lovely to cross the court and the so-called gardens and hope to see Henry Lamb, now a reputed painter with white hair, then a gold-thatched student. With luck one might see Sir Arbuthnot Lane himself arriving to operate. That would make a day, for I was in love with that unusual man. Operations became a frequent and uncloying treat, with no squeamishness left and ward-monotony relieved.

  To be discovered going out with a student could mean dismissal in your third and last year. Punishments were severe. Twice late for closing-time at ten p.m. would forfeit your long-desired week-end, and less serious misdemeanours would stop your rare theatre-leave. To me all this discipline spelt liberty. I had never been allowed to go out alone on foot. My every movement at all times of the day must be known at home. Now, suddenly, my non-working hours up to ten p.m. were my very own.

  At eight o’clock in the evening I would fly out of the ward, across the court into my room, noting as I ran the taxi waiting outside the great iron gates. Five minutes would see me painted and powdered and dressed (as I hoped) to kill, and into the arms of friends or friend. It had all the excitement of an escapade and was as short-lived as a sunset. The Borough is a long way from the fleshpots. The nearest restaurant was called De Keyser’s. A quarter of an hour to get there, a quarter of an hour to get back—two crowded hours of glorious life and no more for forty-eight hours. The other days were limited to one hour’s evening leave, and I never discovered whether one was allowed to leave the premises, but I did not ask and was never caught, and in an hour could make London Bridge or a romantic drive with a favourite. A note would read:

  I will surely be at the iron gate. I will order food and drink to attend us at De Keyser’s. Fat sausages wallowing in crushed potatoes, cheeses, fruits and great quantities of champagne.

  And another:

  Send me, O send me, a message to say that some 9 to 10 or 8 to 10 I may come to carry away my golden nun from her dark cloister to take her to have a drink at the Cheshire Cheese.

  The big party evenings were thrown at the Cheshire Cheese. This was a bit further away, but the atmosphere was alluring. There was a little cubicle on the left of the entrance. It would hold about eight of us, all rollickingly young, I perhaps the gayest, the sailor ashore, the hours so short. I would have to leave the candlelight and merriment and like Cinderella tear back to my brooms, shouting “Hurry, hurry” to the taximan. Twice I missed the fearful hour by a minute or two. I saw the closed gates and almost gave myself up to despair, but both times I was able to plead with the porter to overlook so slight a breach. He relented and did not report me.

  Officers’ Mess, Crystal Palace

  November 1914

  Do try and make a night of it one night next week. I’m sure you can if you exert yourself—surely either the Matron or the Sister is in love with you. We left our cards on you last night. Did you get them? To testify to our grief at your not dining. Don’t do more work than you can help; you looked frightfully tired yesterday. P.

  They didn’t understand. Of course I never got the cards.

  Some nights, leaving the cloister gate, I would cast a fearful look to the shadows in case Mr Taubman should be there. Mr Taubman was a lunatic fan. Everyone, with however little publicity, collects them. He had written to me for several years from Hampstead, frail fluttering pages, traced over with the most exquisite calligraphy, weaving memories of a love that never was. Often the letters were illustrated with a tree, a street-corner—the pictures did not fit the text—and with them were sent presents of punched bus-tickets, old corks, gnawed pencils, sealing-wax-ends, once a silver ring. A friend called Hugh Godley knew this artist and knew him as perfectly sound-minded. Since my retreat to Guy’s he had said he would be waiting for me, and it frightened me unduly, but I never saw his shadow.

  I got on very well and was popular with my fellow-nurses and I think with the patients. Nurses took it in turn to bring a cake for two o’clock teas and there were “dormy feasts” in Matron’s house with hot blackberry tisane, delicatessen, sweets, cigarettes, suppressed songs and laughter, the larks that I had missed by never being a schoolgirl.

  I was moved after a few months from my dear Charity Ward down to Ashley-Cooper Men’s Accident Ward—very different—a high, gaunt, sunless ward, busier and sadder much. Here were the old paralytics, spinal cases that in a minute years ago had lost their powers utterly. They lay there, three or four of them, resigned I think, on water-beds, their heels and elbows and buttocks on air-rings, nothing to be done save to protect them from sores they would not have felt. They talked to one another chiefly about food, for food they could still taste, and I wondered why we never gratified their longings for tripe and winkles and many other curious delicacies of their upbringing. There was a funny D.T.s man I was rather fond of. He was given prescribed doses of spirits, but not enough to still the fears he had of his feet, which he took for two white bogeys sitting at the bottom of his bed. It was a depressing ward with too much to do to do it well. Men were brought in to die in a few hours, and never was there an empty bed. Old lags, so the belief went, would slit the surface of their throats at the hospital doors so as to be brought into warmth and idleness, especially in cold weather, and they were said too to be well up to all the tricks, even to infecting themselves deliberately when they were on the mend. I was moved again to a medical ward, but it’s all the same story till I left after six months.

  * My cousin, killed at Mons.

  † Antony and Cleopatra, act iii, scene 6.

  ‡ The Rt Hon. Harold John Tennant, M.P., then Under-Secretary of State for War.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Frustration and Folly

  I CAN’T remember why my mother grew a determination to move me from Guy’s to a hospital in France. It could not have been my persuasion. I was standing up to the wards very well, and what mattered to me more than anything else was to spend every free hour with the beloved friends in London.

  George Moore, who since the war had beco
me a neutral of the greatest importance, London host of the Commander-in-Chief and a man of power and privilege, played a big part in this scheme, which looks as though I was not reluctant to further it. He found us a château at Hardelot, contributed a few thousand pounds to equip it and put us in the charge of a competent American organiser. I left Guy’s to prepare for our imminent embarkation. Mr Selfridge gave me £2000. Two or three rich Americans, friends of George Moore’s, subscribed generously. I had to do the begging and loathed doing it. The equipment was bought, a Matron engaged and doctors bespoke. We visited the château, approved and ordered alterations, came home and suddenly, after a six-month struggle to survive, the whole scheme collapsed.

  I cannot remember how or exactly why, but there was something sinister, I know. It was the Red Cross who at the last minute refused to sanction the unit. Lady Angela Forbes had had some trouble with her hospital in Boulogne. Was it our backing by the suspect George Moore? Was it my name that was beginning to be overloaded with publicity? Impossible to remember the alleged reasons, but collapse it did. The château became a centre for military training, and two years later Patrick Shaw-Stewart wrote:

  I might tell you of our last eight days up the line, in which I went through several gas-alarms and built myself a wire bed—really comfortable—in a front-row trench. I might tell you of a subsequent hellish five days beginning Intensive Training, and how I was suddenly despatched to the Army School on a Company Commanders’ Course, but I must hurry on to break to you the remarkable fact that the Army School is where? In that notable château where Her Grace and you tried so courageously and so lucklessly to establish a hospital.

  Isn’t it extraordinary? I remember it all rather vaguely and I had no idea how far the preparations had gone, and then on going in, the first room I saw was labelled “Marquess of Granby Ward.” Beside it was “Violet Ward,” upstairs “Marjorie Ward” and opposite “Diana Ward”! You would think that Destiny might have had the sense of fitness to put me in the last-named, but no—I am assigned a bed in a neat hut under the château wall.

  The comble came when, on hearing blankets and sheets—nice ones—were to be had up at the top, I toiled up past “Diana Ward” (somehow they looked so much like surnames I wondered for a moment if you had married Bobbie Ward or—worse—Arnold Ward) to the “Duke’s Room” where a Lance-Corporal stood guard over a heap of superb blankets and sheets. I asked for some and he said: “Sorry, sir, these are the property of the Duchess of Rutland and she cannot allow them to go outside the château.” The temptation was almost overpowering to say I was sure she would be delighted to give me one, producing the blue Peace Charm round my neck as evidence, but I kind of felt that something similar must have been said before to that Lance-Corporal, so I meekly toddled off to draw an army blanket from the Quartermaster several kilometres away. Incidentally some humorist has inserted an N before the T in “Violet Ward.”

  Frustrated and disappointed, my mother spiritedly decided to turn Arlington Street into an officers’ hospital. My father was passive; I was keen. We still had a good bit of capital, and the Red Cross, guilty and thankful to have triumphed, encouraged and contributed to the new scheme.

  The golden drawing-room—a real room-of-all-work—became a ward for ten patients. The ballroom held another twelve. The centre-skylit salon was the dining and club room. The walls were hung with glazed linen, the floors covered in linoleum. My mother’s bedroom was equipped as an operating theatre, divided by glass from sterilising-machines and administrative desks. Sister White and two trained nurses, Manley and Malony, were engaged. (Manley was to continue to live in my house till she married one of her Rutland Hospital patients several years after my own marriage, and Malony remained with my father till his death in 1925.) There were to be several V.A.D.s. I was one of them.

  While the battle for Hardelot was being fought and preparations for the Rutland Hospital being made, there was a pause in nursing. I think I was pleased. It meant more leisure, less independence but more time for the friends, and, when the hospital opened, less—in fact no—discipline and a becoming red uniform with a big organdie Red Cross headpiece.

  A few days were snatched early in March by Edwin Montagu Venetia, Duff, Patrick and me for a fishing spree to a primitive inn on the River Beauly. It was Scatters’s scheme. Scatters’s real name was Sir Matthew Wilson. He was a dashing soldier-baronet from Yorkshire via India, and had married an elder sister of the beautiful Laura Lister, by now Lady Lovat. I had thought as a child that he was funnier than any of the clowns, and he could still keep the table of all ages in a roar. In the North of Scotland we were desperately cold and ridiculously happy. Only one bedroom had a fireplace, and this was given to me, as I had pleaded sickness to get permission for some convalescence. Solemnly every evening the hotel’s only hip-bath was set out on its flannel mat before my fire, and for it we queued, carrying our hot-water cans. When Duff’s turn came he was an unconscionable time behind the locked door, enjoying by a candle’s light in the fire’s flicker my diary, unlocked by the key that locked his own. Five years later the chance came for me to spend a happy hour getting my own back.

  Back in London, the new hospital seemed soft and demoralising after spartan Guy’s, with Scatters arriving from Rumpelmeyer’s laden with chestnut-cream cakes and sherry for our elevenses, with plenty of snug bolt-holes for escaping moods, with usable telephones and hourly contact with the friends, who came a long way before duty, the good of my character, or anything else on earth. They were all scattered by 1915 into various regiments, some abroad, but all of them either training in England or on leave from France gravitating to London. Our dearest pampered George Vernon was training in the Yeomanry; the Grenfells, the Sitwells, Michael and Sidney Herbert, Tommy Bouch and the many others all, all dispersed. Raymond Asquith was training with the Grenadiers at Richmond. Maurice Baring had joined Trenchard, then creating the Royal Flying Corps. Brother John was with General Stuart-Wortley in France. The girls had various war-work in hospitals and canteens. Venetia Stanley had been from the beginning of the war at the London Hospital, Marjorie a new mother lonely at home. Duff was at the Foreign Office—he and Alan Parsons the only two for whom, as Civil Servants, I had no fears. Alan was a victim of an atrocious form of asthma and could never be accepted for the forces, and Duff, whose position was not easy with all his friends gone for soldiers, showed me for the first time his extraordinary strength and serenity of character. He envied his friends and envying them had no false shame at sticking to his office. His closest friend, my cousin John Manners, was killed in the retreat from Mons. This death, the first in the war to hurt us, was of all the losses the one that affected Duff most. John was a glorious young man, a soldier by profession. Raymond Asquith wrote when he died:

  I find it terribly easy to be soppy about John. You see he whipped the Greeks into a top hat at their own game—beauty, temperance, vigour and reserve—and all their tags, the only ones I know, fit him like a glove and drop into their sockets with a sob of joy.

  Patrick Shaw-Stewart, after a short training in England, was on his way to Gallipoli;

  Hood Bat. R.N.D. Med. Ex. Force

  25 April 1915

  Rupert Brooke died two days ago, which has cast a considerable gloom, not the least part over me who had succumbed to the usual magic. He was not leading a charge (we haven’t led any yet) but got the pneumococcus in his lip which killed him in two days. We buried him the same night in an olive grove on a noted Greek island of incredible beauty and appositeness. I commanded the firing party, in so much terror for the correctness of my ceremonial drill that I was inaccessible to sorrow or grandeur. It’s very like Byron, really.

  Venetia Stanley in 1915, free of the London Hospital, was on the brink of marrying Edwin Montagu, then in Asquith’s Government. Edwin was a new Coterie member who being “very old” (not forty) and very eminent we called “Mr Montagu.” We had a struggle to change to Edwin (a difficult name) but he felt the “Mr” p
ut him out of our category. Duff wrote of him:

  He was a man whose ugliness was obliterated by his charm. He had a huge, ungainly body, a deep soft voice and dark eyes that sparkled with humour and kindliness…. He was very nervous and absurdly pessimistic. Whenever he talked about the future he would interject: “But I, of course, shall be dead by then,” and he did die at the age of forty-five.

  In his face shone a benevolence that made me think he must be under some spell and that a magic word, the fall of a sparrow, would allow him to cast his cruel disguise and turn into a shining paragon.

  In this summer of 1915 he would say “My fires give no heat.” That was his attitude to all things, but they blazed brightly enough for us. At his house we saw not unadulterated Coterie, but the Prime Minister and Margot, Winston and Clemmie, Augustine Birrell and most of the Government, politicians, new bloods of the town, and Edwin’s brother in the Naval Brigade, “Cardie” Montagu. But of all these Edwin liked us best.

  Edwin, for years in love with Venetia, had won his hard fight for her hand and was to marry her in July. A week or so before the wedding Katharine and Raymond, Edwin and Venetia went for a Sunday to Brighton. I overcame the usual home obstructions and, claiming the need of sea air, joined them together with Duff. Anxieties and apprehensions were allayed temporarily by the pleasure of escape, the sea, the invigorating bathing and conversation. Edwin was at his most cheerful and appreciative, his noble eyes softer than usual with love for Venetia.