Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  This stationery is disappointingly humble—not so the conditions. I am in a pink bedroom, pink-sheeted, pink Venetian-blinded, pink-soaped, white-telephoned and pink-and-white maided.

  The food at dinner staggers and gluts. Par contre there is little or nothing for lunch, and that foraged for by oneself American-style (therefore favoured, bless him).

  We arrived after midnight (perhaps as chaperones). Jabber and beer and bed was the order. I did not leave the “cabin’s seclusion” until 1 o’clock, having been told that no one else did. H.R.H. was dressed in plus-twenties with vivid azure socks. Wallis admirably correct and chic. Me bang wrong! Golf in the afternoon, only the Prince and Duff playing, Wallis and me tooling round. It poured and we took shelter in a hut and laughed merrily enough with other common shelterers. The social life at The Fort centres round the swimming-pool, which has an elaborate equipment (better than Bognor’s) of long chairs, swabs, mattresses and dumb-waiters bearing smoking and drinking accessories in abundance. It is some little way from the house, so showers cause a dreadful lot of carrying in and bringing out again for the next fitful sun-ray.

  Everything is a few hours later than other places (perhaps it’s American Time. “The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia”). A splendid tea arrived at 6.30 with Anthony Eden and Esmond Harmsworth. Dinner was at 10. Emerald arrived at 8.30 for cocktails, which she doesn’t drink although the Prince prepares the potions with his own poor hands and does all the glass-filling. She was dressed in a red-white-and-blue walking-dress, with tiny blue glass slippers and toes showing through.

  The Prince changed into a Donald tartan dress-kilt with an immense white leather purse in front, and played the pipes round the table after dinner, having first fetched his bonnet. We “reeled” to bed at 2 a.m. The host drinks least.

  The house is an enchanting folly and only needs fifty red soldiers stood between the battlements to make it into a Walt Disney coloured symphony toy. The comfort could not be greater, nor the desire on his part for his guests to be happy, free and unembarrassed. Surely a new atmosphere for Courts?

  Spirits excellent. Can it be due to proximity to royalty? Surely not. I think it’s being entertained and resting from the strain of entertaining. The Prince reminds me of myself at Bognor—over-restless, fetching unnecessary little things, jumping up for the potatoes or soda-water. I’m looking frighteningly ugly. It’s Sunday and mid-day and the music must soon be faced. I quake a little. Lunch at 2. No more or I shall have nothing to tell you on Der Tag.

  Now the Prince was King and everything due to change, but very little was different. Frock-coats were outmoded almost by law, but I cannot remember much else. We continued to go to The Fort and to exciting house-parties clustered round the King.

  The Fort

  17 February 1936

  It’s all been a great “do”—a successful “do.” My health superb. Can’t judge the face. The King unchanged in manners and love. Wallis tore her nail and said “Oh!” and forgot about it, but he needs must disappear and arrive back in two minutes, panting, with two little emery-boards for her to file the offending nail.

  His Majesty’s evening kilt was better than ever. I think it was a mourning one, although he denied it—anyway pale dove-grey with black lines, and his exquisitely-fitting jacket rather Tyrolled-up in shape and improved buttons, and instead of that commonish white lace jabot that is generally worn he had most finely pleated Geneva bands like John Wesley. On Sunday by request he donned his wee bonnet and marched round the table, his stalwart piper behind him, playing “Over the sea to Skye” and also a composition of his own.

  He suggested on Sunday that we should all go over to Windsor Castle and see the library there. “No one ever sees it,” he said; “I know Wallis hasn’t. It’s a bit off the beaten track. There’s an awfully good fellow there called Mr Morshead. He’s most awfully nice. He told me the other day to go over any time I like. He’s got some wonderful things there too.”

  This glorious stationery is new. Nothing much else is changed. The servants are a bit hobbledehoy because H.M. wants to be free of comptrollers and secretaries and equerries, so no one trains them. Last night one brought in the evening paper which carried something about the Ascot Enclosure coming to an end, and said “Lord Granard (mispronounced) has just telephoned to ask Your Majesty if you know anythink at all about it?” “Well, I must say,” said the King, “I call that the top!! I really can’t have messages of that kind. Can you see King George having that asked him?” No time to write. I will at length on the train.

  This was the train to Marrakesh, again to companion Sidney Herbert, whose health ever declined and who was now without a leg though with ever-increasing courage. His friends rallied round him tirelessly. To go to darkest Africa was the greatest of thrills, and we met Juliet Duff in Madrid, where the Civil War had that day begun but was not noticeable. I wrote to Duff:

  Tangier

  22 February

  We’ve come to this very good hotel—your style, with a pretty Moorish bath in an alcove in every room and a lu-lu à côté. Good food, charming bar, space and patios.

  There’s a man called Wylie to whom I had a letter given me by the A.D.C. at Gibraltar. The other party had already picked up with him and invited him and his friend High Wind in Jamaica Hughes to a cocktail. A quiet attractive man with a beard. Alfred Mason had arrived by this time, having had an appalling journey in a single-engined aeroplane. The bar party was gay. I should have liked to have talked to Hughes, but I heard Juliet’s infernal memory urging her to such glibness with him on the subject of High Wind that I felt I couldn’t compete. She’d got all the children’s names and characters pat, and she also had the link of having known well the man Harris, who was a great figure here and whose life Hughes is now writing.

  Tangier

  23 February

  It was your birthday yesterday and I forgot to say so as usual, but I thought of you all day and sent you a telly calling you beloved, although I had no word from you in letter form, so it was like good wishes.

  I’m thinking all the time if you would like it here. Some of it you certainly would. Dining at Menebe’s you couldn’t have failed to be amused by. He sent a smart car with an ordinary plain-clothes gangster as chauffeur. We had all tanked up at the hotel bar, knowing that there would be old Mahomedan customs. We were ushered into an immense white Moorish hall, with round the walls and darting out in T and E shapes hard kind of Wagons-Lit divans, with the hard Wagons-Lit bolster and cushion, all upholstered in a violent Midland Hotel cretonne. The party consisted of us four, Miss Jessie Green who interpreted, and Mr Gye, the British Consul, sweating dreadfully. His Consular servant was on the job and doing most of it with the help of two fat bare-footed women who clearly despised activity. My practised eye caught the glint of four gold-necks in the corner. Then the host sailed down to meet us off a raised alcove, where we were set to eat. A man of rare charm, very tall, with a twinkling dark European face. His arms wide open, something of a black Chaliapin about his grace. He led us to our seats; low corner banquettes, him in the middle and the others quite comfortable on Wagons-Lit divans. Menebe did the piling up of cushions round our bums and elbows and took one comfortable little fall in doing it. We were each handed a large bath-towel for our lap, and on a six-inch-high table were laid in rapid succession the most delicious foods ever I tasted, the first a boiling dish of pastry, so light that you could not get it to your mouth intact, from which peeped hidden quails. Between every three people was a shallow plate of clear honey and another plate with a block of butter on it. Each person had a large hunk of bread to dip into the dishes of butter and honey, and with which to keep their fingers dry. The dishes were so large that although we ate liberally of them, one made no impression. They were all rather the same, and there seemed little reason why the meal should ever stop, or why it should come to the abrupt conclusion it did. The twelve-baskets-full of fragments go in slow d
eclension to The Wife, the wives, the concubines, the minions, the slaves, the dogs, and the blind beggars at the gate. There was a good deal of washing at a stand-up centre brass ablution-arrangement, with a slave pouring hot water from a smart kettle, and soap too. Conversation never lagged and of course there is no greater fun than talking to each other about the house and the host in his presence. Miss Green was very good at the interpreting—an unchangeable drone of voice that in the same tone passed you an oriental compliment or said: “Of course the old man finds it frightfully difficult to get his daughters off.”

  There were five grandfather clocks in a row in the hall and endless photographs of the Royal family, Lord Ripon, Lord Lonsdale, Juliet and her mother. After dinner we moved to an identical room, only smaller, leading from the main hall. Same Wagons-Lit divans and bolsters propped round us, this time covered in rough plush from Birmingham carrying a design of “scotties.” The old Moor found it very difficult to get off his divan and always offered us each a hand to crane him up, but he was so heavy that we could only just do it. Gye, who tried once single-handed, failed, but Menebe laughed through the botchery. Whenever Mason put his hand into the common dish he pulled out mistakes such as bones. “What do I do with this?” he yelled. “Lay it on the table,” came Miss Green’s drone. Another time he got involved with a skewer and to our shame made such a fuss that a slave brought a plate and fork. We flew at him for letting us down, and Menebe had it explained to him that Mason was the “butt” of the party, from which time he took a violent fancy to him and at parting suddenly started tickling him and saying: “Good man, good man!” In three of the hammam rooms that lay off the hall the centre pièce de musée was an English wardrobe like those to be seen in a Grantham hotel bedroom, stained deal with two mirrors and drawers in the middle. In the fourth was a painting of himself by Lavery. It was a great night for me.

  This year of 1936 seems to overflow with events and work and travel. The tangle of threads muddles memory, at any time a preposterously inaccurate recorder. Easter took us on an official visit to the war cemeteries in France. I could not keep the tears from my eyes. Never did I find the grave of a soldier I had known, but to see those innumerable stones with the words “Known unto God” engraved upon them, in acres tended and planted by English hands with English flowers (rosemary, lavender, violets, lilies, roses and stocks), to hear the bees and see the butterflies, to find the gates of the enclosures open and the children playing and hiding and shouting among the tombstones and round the great stone cross, made me half-wish to be laid in such quiet English company.

  The air was already befogged with fears of war. I remember doing a Red Cross gas course and having for the first time an examination through which I scraped. Many people thought this a grotesque precaution, which anyway would be outdated when war came. Conrad wrote in September 1936:

  The Adjutant of the 4th Battalion Somerset Light Infantry, to whom I have offered myself for enlistment, has sent me a form on which I have to say what size hat, boots and shirt I will require in the next war. It makes it feel dreadfully near, and I have to promise to turn out on there being danger of war, not only actual war. That seems to me White Queen trouble.

  Are you happy at Bognor? My spirits droop rather in this painful cold wet weather. I sigh for your company and the comforting warmth of the London picture-houses.

  Doors were opening and shutting too. Alan Parsons had died too young and left me with an aching scar. Maurice Baring was trembling even more than he used to. He did not speak of anxiety. His getting worse may have been too gradual for him to realise its force and speed, but the time would surely come when the disease it proved to be must conquer him. It may have been one day about then that he said, lightly enough, as I tried to help him into his overcoat: “I’m becoming paralysed. I’m sure I am.” I felt it to be true, so could not force myself to say “Nonsense!” His eldest brother, Lord Revelstoke, had died and left his brothers handsome legacies. Maurice, who had never before had juggling-money, felt himself a Croesus and bought a villa in Rottingdean and a little house in Chelsea. Both were arranged in the taste of his young days, with the same William Morris wallpaper of spraying olive-branches, with water-colours of Italy and Switzerland and a grand piano (always open) on which he would quaver out lyric-perfect songs from the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. On the walls hung faded photographs of Sarah Bernhardt, famous beauties, Russians, Danes, literary Frenchmen and women—links with his diplomatic years and the countries and places he had visited. (One that I well remember was of the house of Count Benckendorff at Sosnofka. I remember it because Maurice told me that when he was asked to stay by his hostess she said that there were two trains, one arriving at 4 a.m. and one at 4 p.m., and asked him if he would do his utmost to arrive by the 4 a.m. one, as the servants enjoyed this so much.)

  On the long refectory tables at Rottingdean were piled stacks of books holding snapshots, theatrical programmes, menus scrawled with verses and sketches, letters, Royal Navy jokes and touching mementoes (Maurice spent several weeks a year aboard His Majesty’s ships and was known the Fleet over as “Uncle”) and what we called “Unusual Scraps” of fifty years. Between these stacks stood blue-and-white oriental bowls of potpourri. In his rather suburban overlooked garden grew in abundance pinks and pansies—pansies whose faded heads he decapitated tirelessly with shivering scissors, that they might re-flower throughout the summer.

  New friends from our widening life were made and kept or forgotten—Euan Wallace, David Margesson, Oliver Stanley, Brendan Bracken and Antony Head, now married to our cherished Dorothea Ashley-Cooper, were all fast friends. Randolph Churchill was growing up and threatening to be a lifelong one. Belloc was still much with us. Hutchie had taken silk, and his daughter Barbara had grown up and become beautiful. Kaetchen moved across the Atlantic like a Clipper. He had the direction of my worldly life completely in his clever mobile hands. He was also my martinettish accountant. I loved him dearly, obeyed and honoured him, yet often quarrelled with him. Children I had been frightened of were now self-possessed adults and had become equals. My sisters and my brother, all taken up with their families, I saw less of.

  Another new friend was Dino Grandi, the bearded Italian Ambassador. His Embassy was the happiest in London. Thanks to his magnetic charm, his wit and his true love for England, he weathered until the last day of peace the Abyssinian war and the hundred grievances his country was courting from ours. He had been sent to England as a punishment. He told me that when first he arrived he felt like a soldier imprisoned in a garden. Later he learnt to love the garden, to respect its privacy and even to resent autocratic ways. Once, on his return from Rome, he was still fuming with indignation because his Duce had told him to remove his beard, which was silvering, and worse had suggested that he should beget more children. After all the alarms and tribulations Dino Grandi is still a treasured piece of what remains.

  These crowded days of Generals and functions and being a War Office wife left me less time for my real friends. There was too my dear little boy, growing ever gooder, to take up my thoughts. He was not precocious, though he learned very early to read and write and, curiously enough, to telephone. Once I found him (he must have been four) telephoning to the number of a conjuror whose box of tricks he had been given, to inform him that the magic wand was a bad one, and could he exchange it for one that worked? The conjuror, who answered himself, said that he would come round and see what was wrong. Sure enough the good man came, with the fine present of a shadow theatre, and fled before a new wand was put to the test.

  I took John Julius as often as he liked to the theatre. The open-air one in Regent’s Park was giving A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I bought the most expensive front-row deck-chairs, in which I looked forward to two ecstatic hours. It was a moment of acute disappointment when, after Scene I, a hot whisper in my ear from the child of five asked: “Mummy, may I go when I want to? (I nodded) which is now.” At that moment entered a fairy, and my peace wa
s restored.

  He was musical and as a page at the wedding of Angie Dudley Ward to Bob Laycock, aged five or six, he reproved another toddler for exclaiming when the organ pealed out: “O! what a noise!” “It’s not noise, it’s music,” said John Julius. He had not had much spoiling, in fact there was a certain spartanism in his upbringing. “Accustom the body” was used as a pain-killing hope of future detachment from petty irritations. Accustom it to missing meals, to nettles, to bites and stings, to sleepless nights and a bed of cobblestones. He was afraid (as I had been) of anarchy, but forgetting my babyhood, I would insist on the obedient child breaking laws that I considered obstructive. I remember making him pull up stakes put across Roman grass-tracks in Sussex to impede our wild cross-Downland motoring. But I remembered confession to crime and subsequent apology being horrible to me, with their accompanying tears, so John Julius was taught to be sorry or to pretend sorrow for misdeeds without hesitation. This method softens the scolder, but it leaves room for no true repentance or resolve to sin no more.

  He was being educated first at a little open-air school in Regent’s Park, by Mrs Milner at Wigmore Hall for music and, from the age of seven, at Egerton House, Mr Hodgson’s day-school in Dorset Square. Duff and I had planned that the horrors of a preparatory school should be avoided and that he should remain a London day-boy until it was time for Eton, with perhaps a year in a Swiss school between the two. The war knocked this plan into a cocked hat. Egerton House was all that one could wish, with its sensible work, its ridiculous theatricals, its prize-fights, which I felt bound to attend, dreading the yearly sight of a child of seven trying to brush his tears away with the back of a boxing-glove, and the Sports Day, which took place at Hampton Court. This was a feast of fun, specially for me, who knew my capacity for keeping out of Mothers’ Egg-and-Spoon Races and other humiliations. Duff, not so armed in obstinacy, suffered sweaty qualms at the fear of obstacle, sack and three-legged races, and the hundred-yards Fathers’ Sprint. John Julius and I in our wisdom protected him when other fat fathers were pressed by their mischievous sons to butcher themselves for their holiday. These athletic enterprises never came for John Julius to any form of blossoming. This mattered little to me, who am no sports-spectator and prefer romantic bookworms. Mrs Milner’s half-yearly pupils’ concert would keep me awake for two nights with fear. The little boy on his piano-stool, with feet far from the floor hanging so touchingly limp, dressed in a Duff tartan, his hair Nanny-neat for the occasion, playing The Merry Peasant and an encore, I can see as plainly now as then.