Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  Well, the Tag went wonderfully well, and the old friends behaved splendidly. Sister Marjorie arrived first. Duff and she walked up the enfilade of rooms, turning switches on and off and straightening rugs, while I was reducing the inch-thick paint on my face. Ettie [Desborough] came next, bringing confidence to us, and then Stanley Baldwin and Lucy. She was in a new dress—white satin slashed with blue. A Rigoletto page.

  We served no cocktails (too fast, we thought) but old sherry was on tap and Mrs Baldwin said: “That’s a thing Stanley can’t resist,” and Mr Baldwin said: “Then just half a glass.”

  Desmond [MacCarthy] came next in white-tied gala get-up, but with studs missing and laundry-kisses all round the crooked tie. We couldn’t wait for your Minister [Walter Elliot] and he arrived, like the unnervous man of the world he is, a proper quarter of an hour late. Hilda the cook surpassed herself. Politics were not touched upon in front of the ladies. There was a little pig-talk to Walter Elliot (Minister of Agriculture) because I was thinking of you. Here’s the table:

  Me

  Mr Baldwin Walter

  Marjorie Ettie

  Desmond Duff

  Mrs Baldwin

  You can’t make a dinner without eggs, and yours were the basis. Maurice sent a forest of gardenias—too exotic really, but I strewed them on the table all the same and it helped to allay that appalling corpse-smell in the dining-room. A. weighed in with too-good fruit, a gigantic foie gras which I didn’t let appear (too rich from both angles) and a dessert service which I was able to send back before it arrived.

  Mrs Baldwin “took twice” of the savoury roes (soft). They (the Baldwins) left at 11.15 and we had a post-mortem for half an hour and read some purple patches from Stanley’s book. Then Ettie went and Marjorie imitated her. Then Marjorie and Walter Elliot went and Desmond remained until all hours.

  I kept beautifully quiet through everything and no one got drunk. God bless you.

  Conrad replied:

  Your letter describing the dinner-party arrived this morning. It is a good letter, a very good letter. It is the best letter I have received in my life. I am a good judge of that kind of thing. You have brought the dinner before my eyes. I had to bring your letter to the mangel-pulling with me. It is Carter’s Lord Wardens now, as I’ve finished Kirsch’s Ideals. I would pull about twenty Lord Wardens, then stop and wipe my great red dirty hands on the seat of my trousers, take your letter out and read a few paragraphs. The men thought it odd, and I heard Bert say to Ern: “Maaster tarnashun funny smorning Ah think.” And Ern answered: “Zim zo.” They talk like that.

  Down on the ranch in the Far West I had become horsy—an enthusiastic rider with an uncertain seat and no “hands.” Here in England, gone were the chaps and the dude-stuff, the Western saddle and the Spanish stirrups so hard to lose. Only the jeans and the good Armada boots remained, and whenever I had a chance I would ride. Tommy Macdougal had lent me an Arab-blooded white hack called Cerise. I kept her at Goodwood and, while Duff wrote about Haig, I would ride alone in Goodwood Park, ambling through wild roses and honeysuckle, with the song of larks and the smell of hay about me, and so taste ecstasy. Sometimes a party of us would gallop along the close-cropped watershed of the Sussex Downs from Goodwood to Steyning, over Amberley and past Chanctonbury Ring, where on Midsummer Eve many fear to go. It was a wonderful ride uncrossed by traffic. I rode it once with Evelyn Waugh, but it was marred by a hang-over. Staying away and being mounted on any old horse was not so happy. I wrote to Conrad from a stately home:

  This house is in a sad state of disrepair. None of the lu-lus work. Everyone complained after being seen running down the passage with jugs of water and anxious faces. The bedrooms are pitch-dark, although there are plenty of lamps. The bulbs are at fault (superannuated!).

  The stables too are a disgrace. Crocks covered in stinking stained horse-blankets, old dung all over everything, harness without a shine and reins sticky. E. said that we could ride and that I had better have Sooty. So I had Sooty, who was a sort of Queen Victoria’s Highland Diary pony. Venetia had the Master’s bay hunter. We mounted in the stable-yard. A half-witted boy got me up. Then out of a sty leapt Venetia’s charging Tom-Webster animal, with mean rolling eyes, 200 hands high, mouth and groins a washtub of suds. It was raining. All the gates were padlocked. We had not been offered a key. Venetia’s brute bucked and plunged and pulled and made the noises that stallions make, and when we got in the head groom was waiting with an ashy face, saying: “I never thought you’d get home unhurt. It’s the greatest brute ever bred. His Lordship’s been trying to sell him and can’t. He’s not fit for any lady to ride, nor any man for that matter.”

  Max Beaverbrook became a riding enthusiast too. He bought Cerise from Tommy Macdougal and gave her to me. It was a great relief to ride my own directable darling, who tried to do what she was asked, instead of Max’s rough self-willed strangers. Valentine Castlerosse had stepped up the “hands” of the Cherkley stud, as he had to have heroic horses to carry his great weight. Max was very brave and I very timorous as we rode (never con brio) in his Surrey woods or galloped away from Calvin Lodge, his house at Newmarket. “I shall never ride again,” I say now without sorrow. “I shall never play tennis again,” I said at twenty-five with glee. “I shall never ski again,” I said when the last war was declared. None of these renunciations do I regret, so unproficient was I at all athletics.

  Sport took us yearly to Euan Wallace, the best and dearest of men, who with his wife Barbie and his five sons made me love and understand Scotland. There somehow I kept my end up. I wrote to Conrad:

  On the high road to Scotland

  September 1934

  Health bulletin first; excellent. Miasmas over-ridden, soaring spirits, glowing body, boundless schemes and plans in profusion. Even looking forward to autumn fashions and furs and Molyneux. Plans include a tunny-fishing expedition (not for you). It would have to be Venetia (who might get bored but never cold, never tired, never sick) or Raimund (but his wife might snivel) or Mr Wu [Evelyn Waugh], but what would Kommer say? “Wooing Mr Wu?”

  Another plan—a visit to the Soviets. I can go with Barbie Wallace and Maureen Stanley, but this entails flying to Leningrad. I could join them by train and see what Tchekov and Maurice saw—moujiks and tea and introspective passengers reading Milton. I would be alone for that part, unless you came with me. We must put it off until snow-time. Very keen I am.

  My melancholia left me on my birthday. It’s all been good since. Seeing you again was an excitement and a calming.

  Kildonan

  Here by 7. A huge house built since the war, very nice and very comfortable with water (tap and filtered) as dark as cocoa. All the boys—Duff, Euan, Seymour Berry, Sir John Milbanke, Loel Guinness, two Loughborough boys, two Wallace-Sackville boys, three Wallace-Lutyens boys—played golf. I read Mr Wu’s book aloud to Barbie, Joan Guinness and Sheila Milbanke with overwhelming success.

  In the evenings I play backgammon and in two I have won a tenner. Today I went shooting with the boys, leaving at nine in my silly blue cotton trousers and still sillier Mexican boots. Duff was a little cross early, as he so hates the unusual, poor beast, so he told me that there was a hurricane blowing and a lot of rain about. But I thwarted him and went, partly because the tone always is when I get out of a Mayfair drawing-room or Venice or Salzburg or bed: “Whatever are you going to do to amuse yourself in these wilds?” and I can’t bear it. Also I have Pride of Boot, Loyalty and Amour Propre for the old kangaroo-skins and they proved their worth on the moor all right. It was an almost heatherless bog. The other girls (only two of them came out to lunch) hated it, and Duff was pleased in the end, but will be every bit as bad next time.

  14 September 1934

  It’s rainbow weather, a lot of rain and shine. I’ve just had a hot bath. Immersed one looks like chicken in aspic.

  Another less sporting visit followed closely, this time to the Winston Churchills at Chartwell.

  Well, my d
arling, we got here very late for luncheon, both speechless—Duff with rage, me with skid-anxiety and general distress at rudeness. I had had a wearing morning taking the baby and Nanny to my idea (not Nanny’s) of an acrobatic dancing school, where he would learn cartwheels. It was the squalidest thing ever I saw. I dared not meet Nanny’s eye. Old sponges and rags and ends of grease-paint lay among clouds of dust and pools of sweat. They pulled out a rug to make a ground for the baby’s cartwheels and it was like opening the desert. John Julius said: “A bit crummy, isn’t it?”

  Then I ran for the car and Chartwell. Forty winks in the afternoon and then (unexpectedly) bathing at 7 in pouring rain, intensely cold with a grey half-light of approaching night, yet curiously enough very enjoyable in its oddness. Freda Ward, Winston, Duff, Clemmie, Randolph and a child, in fact the whole party, were splashing about with gleeful screams in this sad crepuscule. The secret is that the bath is heated, and it is Winston’s delightful toy. Just now, again, twenty-four hours later, he called for Inches, the butler, and said: “Tell Allen to heave a lot more coal on. I want the thing full blast.” Inches returned to say that Allen was out for the day. “Then tell Arthur I want it full blast,” but it was Arthur’s day out as well, so the darling old schoolboy went surreptitiously and stoked himself for half an hour, coming in on the verge of apoplexy. Again we all had to bathe in the afternoon.

  Then “feeding the poor little birds” is a huge joy to him. They consist of five foolish geese, five furious black swans, two ruddy sheldrakes, two white swans—Mr Juno and Mrs Jupiter, so called because they got the sexes wrong to begin with, two Canadian geese (“Lord and Lady Beaverbrook”) and some miscellaneous ducks. The basket of bread on Winston’s arm is used first to lure and coax and then as ammunition. The great aim is to get them all fighting. “We must make a policy,” he says; “you stone them and we will get the five flying fools on their right flank.”

  Soon after this came my journey to Rome alone as an emissary of government to deter the Italians from attacking Abyssinia. This unusual assignment grew from a mustard-seed dropped at one of those House of Commons dinner-parties, just before the policeman shouted “Who goes home?” Amongst others sat Duff, Winston Churchill and Lord Tyrrell, former Ambassador and Head of the Foreign Office, all of them heated and anxious about Italy’s coming violation of Ethiopia. Methods were discussed of discouraging Mussolini’s unnecessary resolve. They could think, at dawn, of no better way than to depute me, due for Rome two days later, to inform those in dictatorial power how strongly England was against the aggressor. This journey can be called the real Failure of Mission—just as well send a tramp. What hope had I of harnessing Italy from beneath the hospitable roof of 3 Foro Romano? My tickets for the canonisation of our English saints would get me nowhere but to St Peter’s. The only opportunity that offered itself was a luncheon-party in my host Lord Berners’s house, when several close friends of Ciano, the Foreign Minister and son-in-law of the Duce, were present. The burden of my message I must have spluttered out too vehemently, for the Princess San Faustino made a major exit before the meal was eaten, outragedly banging the door as she left, and the aggrieved Lord Berners found difficulty in forgiving me. I don’t blame him—he had the Fascist vengeance to face.

  Then came a General Election in which a Labour lady opposed us in St George’s. Although we spent most of the three weeks’ campaign touring the country and revisiting Oldham, we still won by a good majority.

  Duff had hardly dug himself into his room at the Treasury before he received his summons to the Cabinet. It was the War Office. This was excellent, for he knew the ropes, the Army and hierarchy. While he was Financial Secretary I had trembled for his mathematics (Duff was no wizard with figures), but with the Generals and the Army Council all would be “Sir Garnet” and I would fling myself into reviews and tattoos, and re-read the decisive battles of the world, learn the ranks and distinguishing marks, and try not to fall foul of anyone. I had not known many Generals. The first I had seen was General Buller, helping Queen Victoria out of her carriage in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace on some black day of defeat in the South African war. “Bobs,” gartered and resplendent though little bigger than myself at fourteen, I saw on some gala occasion. Kitchener’s insensitive strength had crushed an antique ring to twisted smithereens when he had wrung my adolescent hand, and I could never forgive him. French I had known as an omnipotent uncle in youth and war, and Freyberg as a dedicated boy, the inspiration of my fighting contemporaries. Generals de Gaulle and de Lattre de Tassigny I was to meet, study and admire ten years later (that is for another volume), but the brass-hats of 1935 were unknown soldiers to me. When, subsequently translated to another element, I found myself among Admirals, I remembered the Generals as being more unusual and unexpected (even eccentric), more surly and heated and generally less serene. The Admirals seemed to be all moulded, no doubt by the restriction of their island-ships and solitude, into a sameness. Now must I learn the soldiers’ distinguishing marks—crowns, crossed swords, sphinxes, grenades, pips and stripes—and above all the perplexing alphabet language (“What’s C.I.G.S.? What’s Q.M.G.? And A.G.? And D.M.S.?”) in those smaller pre-war days more easily acquired and differentiated. I must remember though not to show off by talking in initials to the uninitiated. I must buy new clothes for Camberley and manœuvres and Trooping the Colour, and remember not to fall into the perennial temptation of delving into the dressing-up box for trappings and symbols suitable to the occasion, to eschew khaki, scarlet and high fur hats, to avoid trying to look like Boadicea or pretty Polly Oliver, and to be demure, as suited a serious newly arrived Cabinet wife. Indeed, I did feel serious and aglow with pride and resolve to conform and please. It would not be difficult nor fearful to walk the brilliant path by Duff’s side. In every way we were blessed. I must never again tire or sicken or moan.

  The publication of the first volume of Duff’s book on Haig received vicious press reviews but paeans of praise from those who mattered—from Trevelyan and Kipling, John Buchan and Maurice Baring. Conrad wrote:

  You made me feel that I didn’t say enough about Haig. Who am I to praise it? I admire Duff enormously as a man of letters. The book is in the grand manner, but all his own. You never feel that he’s imitating Gibbon or Macaulay or Froude (all Whigs, so add Hume) and never, never, never, never, never, is there a phrase even remotely influenced by Lytton Strachey. It’s very dignified and the very way that good biography is written. If the book isn’t praised it will be caviar trouble—not enough educated people to see how good it is. The man Haig is somehow dull—dull compared to Marlborough, Nelson or Wellington—but the book seemed without flaw to me.

  Margot Oxford wrote:

  Dearest Duffy, I would not turn a hair were I you over the spiteful criticisms of your Haig. My autobiography was cursed and abused by everyone at the time, but on reading it again the other day (for the first time!) I think it very good.

  I wish I could think that on re-reading this book of mine I shall feel the same.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Fort and the Cruise

  IN January 1936 King George V died. Duff was perhaps the last Minister to receive the seals of office from his dedicated hands. He faded gently out of life, and when the bulletin was issued that “The King’s life is moving peacefully to its close,” his subjects were unexpectedly moved.

  At Westminster he lay in state for several days. From morning until night a procession of tearful mourners passed through from west to east, silent on the thick felt that had been laid on that pavement of history. The queue stretched for miles, and had to be stopped forming three or four hours before the time when one hour must be given to regarnishing the Hall, renewing the tall candles and freshening the flowers. I went almost nightly. Through a secret door one could slide into the centre of the moving masses, and there I would lead, in patriotic and monarchic pride, any foreign friends visiting London. The night that I took Henry Bernstein the sentinels at the four co
rners of the bier, heads deeply bowed, were the dead King’s four sons. Later we saw the small coffin pass with the crown laid upon it, and noticed that the cross had fallen from its summit. We saw the four Princes, cold and disconsolate, following their father in the London drizzle. We saw his body laid in the vault at Windsor, and life begin again at Westminster.

  Neither my family nor Duff’s had been at all intimate with the Royal Family, not at least since Duff’s uncle, who was a neighbour of Queen Victoria at Balmoral, was made Duke of Fife that he might marry the eldest daughter of King Edward VII. My mother’s father was the old Queen’s equerry, so she was often at Balmoral, where she had been petted and even painted by the Queen in water-colour. I own the picture. It is of a tall girl, her auburn hair knotted low on a slender neck, in a black, trained dress, probably of silk.* It is the only portrait I know that the royal hand drew, though it painted in hundreds the Balmoral moors.

  But neither of these connections had brought friendships. The Prince of Wales, now King Edward VIII, was the first of the family that we both knew intimately and had admired and loved for several years. He had turned a royal folly near Virginia Water into a liveable house, where he could rest from his labours at the week’s end. It was called Fort Belvedere and was a child’s idea of a fort. Built in the eighteenth century and enlarged by Wyatville for George IV, it had battlements and cannon and cannon-balls and little furnishings of war. It stood high on a hill, and the sentries, one thought, must be of tin. Here Duff and I had sometimes stayed. It was completely informal. I wrote to Conrad in July 1935: