Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  After my father’s death, my mother took the pretty manor house of Eastwell near Melton Mowbray, where she would harbour John Julius when I was on my travels. She was the best of all influences, and I was for ever pestering her with directions for his education. Lines must be drawn three-quarters of an inch apart for his writing and he must be given funny sentences that amused him to write. He must practise the piano regularly with scales and four-finger exercises, holding his thumb down, and learn by heart. He must be scolded if he is sick in the car and there must be no spoiling. He must always say that he is sorry immediately, be demonstrative, say his prayers with meaning and not have ugly toys—in fact, the same injunctions as she had herself instilled in me. She would have given her life for the little boy, so I felt that with her and Nanny Ayto he was well protected.

  My mother rarely left the Lyceum Theatre while I was there. The biscuits and Ovaltine came with her, and coffee or chocolates from the bar kept her going. Tilly Losch was the Nun and the first professional to take the part. I had always admired and liked Tilly. Kaetchen was our go-between, but on the stage we were far from happy, though the bad-fellowship did not last long enough permanently to destroy my nerves or my admiration for Tilly. Massine was the Spielmann, as inventive as Krauss had been and more trustworthy. The play was less of a success than it had been in the United States. It cost far less and was produced with less taste, and Tilly shattered the story by insisting upon dying. Cochran being wax in her hands, she was allowed to die, and by so doing the Madonna’s sacrifice in taking on the Nun’s duties, that her broken vows and shameful vagaries might not be known in the convent, became unnecessary. It was Winston Churchill who was most irritated by this travesty of the legend and its symbolism, and it was King George V whose praise for my effort was most unfortunately phrased. After a performance which he and Queen Mary attended, I was sent for, as is the custom. In the Royal Box the King said that he had enjoyed it and asked how I managed to keep so still and all the expected questions. But my laurels wilted when instead of: “Wonderful that you can express so much with gesture only,” he said: “Of course, you’ve got no words to learn or say, and that’s half the battle.” I felt that he was right, but wished he had not said it.

  The Miracle always brought me good things in its train, and one night after the performance it brought me Evelyn Waugh. There was a treasure-hunt in full cry and the kill was to be at the Café de Paris at Bray. When we arrived the hunt was up, but the merriment was still there and I knew then that I wanted to bind Evelyn to my heart with hoops of steel, should he let me. Treasure-hunts were dangerous and scandalous, but there was no sport to touch them. Carefully laid with intricacy and invention, they could be made beautiful and need knowledge and concentration to follow. A clue might lead to a darkened city court, there to find a lady in distress, with a dead duellist at her feet, who would hand the next clue through her tears. This might lead to a far plague-spot where a smallpoxed ghost would whisper a conundrum that took you to a mare’s nest in Kensington Gardens, and thence to a Chinese puzzle in Whitechapel. Quick thought, luck and unscrupulous driving might bring you first to the coveted prize. Duff disapproved and disbelieved in the wild ecstasy until one night when the meet was at Gower Street and the Prince of Wales was to be a hunter. Duff must have felt it loyal to join in, for he went with me in our little open car, caught the fever, and shouted “Faster, faster! It doesn’t matter about the bobby! What’s the matter with the car? Step on it!” He was quicker than anyone at guessing the clues, so we won. We also won a scavenge-hunt, a derivative of the treasure-hunt that was less dangerous and equally exhilarating, in which the prize went to the first to bring home a collection of objects all-but-impossible to find in London at night—perhaps a horse-shoe, a gentleman’s boater or a life-buoy. The last item on the list had to be “something unique.” I cannot remember what we found, but Michael Herbert (I can see his face, shocking-pink with pride of certain success) produced that night a coutil-busked corset belonging to Mrs Lewis of the Cavendish Hotel, signed, cross-signed and undersigned with the names, quips and quizzes of her noble and notable clients.

  In the autumn The Miracle took to the road. I did not live in digs, but in the best hotels, and in those days there were none better—the Midland in Manchester, the L.M.S. in Newcastle, the Angel in Cardiff, the Caledonian in Edinburgh and the North British in Glasgow. In these towns I was happy enough, though alone but for faithful Wadey. A ceaseless procession of influenza-funerals in Cardiff, and Tiger Bay less coloured than it sounds, were depressing, and Southsea was not up to much. There the maid asked me if I had brought my cruet when she served me my dinner of a boiled egg. Duff would join me for Sundays when I was near London, and from the north Glen Byam Shaw and I would take six-shilling sleepers so as to spend one day at home with those we loved.

  I was in Manchester with Evelyn Waugh when Duff’s Talleyrand was published. He had been writing with diligence and calm for three years, much of it at Bognor, pacing serenely up and down the sea-washed garden, planning the construction of his sentences, polishing and burnishing them until they could be written in his scarcely corrected manuscript. It cost him no pain or anxiety. He spoke little about it and read it to me very rarely. He knew how it disturbed me and how my critical sense, never strong, took flight through protective love before his literary style. The book was to come out about the same time as Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief. Dread was in all my bones that Duff’s book would be pilloried while Evelyn’s novel would soar into literary and lucrative fame. Fears were liars, and they both had glowing notices and fabulous sales. Evelyn had expected acclamation, but this was Duff’s first book and he had feared for it, as I had done for his disappointment. Pride and relief filled my heart to brimming.

  Evelyn had come to Manchester to help me with my rather lonely life, though there were two friends in the cast of The Miracle whom I have never lost—Glen Byam Shaw, then playing a decadent prince, now the strength and taste of Stratford, and Simon Fleet, with whom I would eat Mars bars in the interval, and with whom I still eat chocolates in the stalls of theatres or while gardening, every happy time we meet. Evelyn was splendid with my mother, who came for the Edinburgh and Glasgow runs. She was very fond of him, and more fond when he had had a stiff whisky-and-soda. She approved only of the sober, yet never differentiated them from the tipsy. Evelyn introduced me to The Wind in the Willows, reading it aloud in the rest hours. Together we would motor over the wild Derbyshire Peak and look at famous houses. In the evenings we supped at the Café Royal in Edinburgh, where a cricketer holds his bat straight in a stained-glass window and where the Scottish Nationalists gathered.

  He who came to help my loneliness and stayed to become the noblest and dearest friend of my middle-age was Conrad Russell, and he must have a chapter to himself.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Gothic Farmer

  CONRAD belonged to that distinguished and most unusual family of Russells in which no member resembles another and one and all are unlike any other people. His father, Lord Arthur Russell, was a brother of the ninth Duke of Bedford, and his mother, formerly Laura de Peyronnet, was French. They once took their six children, with two nurses, over the Alps in a berlin to broaden their minds. At the Pass of St Bernard, Conrad remembered his father taking them into an icy barn where the frozen victims of exposure and snowdrift lay stiffly in rows. So much for his childhood. Later, like all Russells, he was educated at home by private tutors. No school, four years at Oxford and one at Cambridge had given him a sound classical grounding and a generally cultivated mind. Like his three brothers and two sisters, he enjoyed an allowance of several hundreds a year from his Duke, and with this and what he made in the City he had no money-worries. After the 1914 war he discovered that his unrobust health had improved with exposure to heat and cold and rain, so he determined to shake the City dust from his feet and tread a farmer’s field. Now he was living in his cottage-farm at Mells and I suggested, when staying at the Ma
nor House one Sunday, that he should return with me to Cardiff and see The Miracle. I was surprised and, truth to say, a little taken aback when he agreed to come. Knowing all his family well and him so slightly, my old fears of responsibility for his enjoyment returned—fears of my shortcomings. He came and I loved him. It was as cold as Christmas when we walked round that unusual Welsh town. He held my frozen fingers comfortably with his well-shaped farmer’s hand, warm in the pocket of his Inverness coat, and his tender benevolence and humour made the civic palaces look more Utopian, and the stone animals scrambling over the machicolated castle-wall more grotesque.

  Conrad was very tall and a little bent, though not with years. His feet turned out like a penguin’s, his hair was white and crisp and even, his face gothic: “The Gothic Farmer,” Kaetchen christened him. I could not know in Cardiff how much he was to mean to me, but even then he meant something to be esteemed and cherished, someone for whom to improve. I felt anxious to give all I could in exchange for his wit, his richly stored mind, his powers of pleasure, his truth and devotion. Conrad wrote letters with an incomparable flavour—annals of the parish and of the daily doings of his labourers, of life at the Manor House, where lived the Horners, and of his neighbours, of unusual angles on current events or on the cream of the book that he was reading, of plans for meetings and of presents.

  Presents started right away and played a very important part; into their selection it amused us both to put unusual thought and inventive taste. Conrad had once been a jobber in the City, and while he had been unhappy in his work it had left him with an amused interest in speculation. These flutters, so often successful, were linked with presents. Jewellery was his choice, while my gifts to him were for his curious little five-room house. His sitting-room held a most unusual and characteristic crowd of objects, pictures, books and papers. There was a long shelf of saints and sages in china, glass or lead. Confucius and Kant, I remember, were among them; Tycho Brahe, the sixteenth-century astronomer, hovered somewhere; and there were two large Staffordshire figures on the chimney-piece of Cardinal Manning and Mr Gladstone. Under these fixed stars were many lesser ones, cut out from reproductions and stuck on to his dark-green dado-height cupboards. To this gathering I added a Samarkand rug, a bust of blind Homer with green wreath and pink drapery, and a coloured print of the Woburn sheep-shearing. For his austere bedroom, suited to a monk, there was a counterpane quilted by miners’ wives in Durham, holding strictly to an Elizabethan geometrical design.

  No subject was too mean to be made twinkling and touching by Conrad, not even systems for making money at race-meetings or by flutters in the City. The clear frank hand and what it wrote were, I think, Greek in measure and proportion of living. Every week he came for twenty-four hours, to London in winter and to Bognor in summer, and that day we called our Tag for treats. He would bring me the first primroses or a palatable cheese of his own making, or butter and eggs, for he was my poulterer and dairyman and was to make me a smallholder in 1940 to fight against starvation, following blockade and invasion. His farm wove through every subject, and I liked it as a theme as well as any. Our letters start in 1933 and grow in bulk and intimacy until Conrad’s death in 1947. I have long wondered how I could show Conrad as he lived, and being artless and craftless, I have thought that snippets from his letters might act as facets and when assembled show the gem. I am not hopeful of succeeding:

  Little Claveys, Mells

  The Tag was a lovely one. It was nice too to be doing the same old things—loafing in the Strand, mooching round Woolworth’s, buying oranges, going to the pictures, eating before the drawing-room fire, Cordon Bleu potatoes, dirty jokes at the Victoria Palace. There is nothing to touch the pursuit of pleasure.

  I will come to Gower Street (or anywhere else you choose) at 5 on Thursday next. What fun! But what if it rains? I suppose it will have to be the waxworks or the Indian embroideries in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  Hyperion (trained by Mr George Lambton at Newmarket) has won the Derby. Many, many months ago I put five bob on him for a place and truly my foresight is richly rewarded.

  I have sold some more indifferent shares—rubbish, but I got £270 and the Inspector of Taxes returned me £106 today. Dear Diana, will you consider this question of a present from me? Keep in mind that I am rich, childless and affectionate. Sparklers, jewels, rings, baguettes or a fur coat for the winter? They say if you buy a fur coat in August for two or three hundred guineas you can get one which looks as if it must have cost 1500 guineas if winter comes.

  I very nearly bought you a tiara at Cartier’s which you said cost £10,000. It was not the price that deterred me but I feared to embarrass you by giving it, and I thought I might look a bit sheepish if I arrived with it in my hand at Gower Street and there was another man calling on you already. No one likes to be made to look sheepish.

  I read Benson’s Miss Brontë* with passionate interest. How extraordinary about Monsieur Héger! Do you think she was his mistress? What did she go to confession for? And why did Madame Héger hate her so and piece together the torn-up love letters?

  As I sit here I can see part of the yellow Samarkand rug that you gave me, but I haven’t the power nor enough ink to describe its divine beauty. It was sweet to talk to you again last night. Now you’re in the train going to Wales.

  I think it was Mademoiselle Claire (not Louise) Héger who used to say it was a woman’s first duty to be amiable, and I thought about it on Salisbury Plain yesterday, and I thought if there is a more amiable woman than you in the world, it is that I haven’t met her. From the moment the train left Bristol for Cardiff last winter to the moment yesterday when we two parted, in silence and tears, I’ve never seen you cross or grumpy; I’ve never had a harsh word or unkind look from you; I’ve never even seen the shadow of a shade of impatience with me cross your face. And I know that I must be a trying man.

  A propos of Henry VIII:

  The Duke of Buckingham calls himself “poor Edward Bohun.” His family name was Stafford. Some people have thought that Shakespeare made him say “Bohun” because he was descended from the Bohuns on his mother’s side, but the most likely explanation is that Shakespeare made a stupid mistake.

  When Wolsey was a young priest and rector of Limington (Somerset) Sir Amyas Paulet put him in the stocks. We don’t know why. Do you think drabbing likely? Anyhow when Wolsey became Lord Chancellor he summoned Sir Amyas to London and shut him up for six years in the Middle Temple.

  I did enjoy the play very much, but I thought Laughton poor, and Wolsey ought to have been much prouder and more magnificent. He was as proud as Lucifer.

  I’ve sold 100 more American Celanese, and some of the previous sales were higher than the calculations we made together. There is now £3649 realised and I still have 350 shares. I am putting £2000 in the preferred shares of the same company to get a bit of income. But what is money? Only dross, and the temptation to a life of idleness and lechery is, goodness knows, great enough already.

  I’ve been reading about gold-crested wrens being fed in the nest. There were seven fledglings and the feeding was mainly done by the cock. Each bird ate 150 times a day. The droppings were collected and the weight equalled half the weight of the bird. The two parents and seven young weighed together ONE OZ. Yet they fly from Norway to England in mid-winter.

  I made butter in the morning and pulled mangels in the afternoon. Nothing like half pulled yet. I hope I don’t get caught by Jack Frost.

  The three women who went as old ladies to George I’s Court were Lady Dorchester, Lady Orkney and the Duchess of Portsmouth. They had been mistresses to James II, William III and Charles II respectively. Lady Dorchester said: “God! Who would have thought we three whores should have met here!”

  A cart-horse is lame, and a sow supposed to be in pig isn’t in pig. “She’s come on hogging again,” we coarsely say. It will throw out my contract for December baconers. Do you think it’s morally wrong to mate a sow with her own father? I
f not morally wrong, is it undesirable? I wish I knew. The only book which mentions the point says: “To mate her with her own father sometimes turns out a boomerang.” What does that mean?

  Conrad’s old cart-horse Prince had some repellent disease (hoof-rot, I suppose) and became because of this loathsome infirmity an outstanding animal figure.

  There is one thing that everyone is agreed about. I mean Prince. “Worse than ever” is the universal opinion. There are horses to be sold at Nunney on Thursday and I must get one and have poor Prince shot. His epitaph will be:

  Good night, sweet Prince,

  And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. R.I.P.

  Later: I bid 46 guineas for Smart and dropped out. So Prince breathes again, but his offence is rank and smells to Heaven.

  Just got Norah off to the dairy show, accompanied by her great friend, another dairymaid called (believe it or not) Miss Bullock.