Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  Another night on deck with a 7 a.m. waking. After sour milk and foaming coffee ashore Duff and I hired a rather Heath Robinson motorcar driven by a “middy” of the Jugoslav Navy. We told him to drive to an old patrician villa twenty miles away. It took an hour to get to, and was a drive of the greatest beauty and the greatest danger—narrow hairpinned road, thick layers of loose shingle as a skidding-surface, and unparapetted. It was worth the pain. The little old owner of eighty-four received us in brown boots, good tussore trousers and a pyjama-top. The property has been in their possession since 1200 and he is the last of the line and thankful for it. He thinks the new world so abominable. He spoke only unintelligible French but managed to make me cry with a story of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico and his wife Carlotta. They were having a meal under a great tree in his garden, and they took the knives from the table and carved their names and hearts on the tree. She threw her arms around him and said: “O Maximilian, O Maximilian, nous allons toujours être heureux comme aujourd’hui.” It was a Castle Ichabod all right, but the old man was so happy and alertly young for his age, and gay about things ending, and even death itself.

  We sailed away at 1.30, too soon for me. There was a deal left to see, but the restaurants and bars were exhausted, so off we went. My clothes are standing up to the situation fairly well. The others never wear the same dress twice. I can’t do that, of course, but mine are appropriate and sensible.

  At five-ish we turned into the Bocche di Cattaro, the fiord of the Adriatic, very beautiful sinister country, the wall of the mountain so high that the light is depressing. We went ashore with the usual arrangements of Mayors. It’s a very small town of only 2500 souls, very poor-looking, no shops, hotels or bars, Venetian influence strongly marked and a great deal of treasure owned by the Churches, both Catholic and Greek—silver tables, many silver arms and legs enclosing fragments of shins and funnybones of various saints. The party wanted to be off again at 7, but there were pathetic Japanese lanterns with single candles hung up and little pyramids of Greek Fire along the quayside, so thank God we settled to wait for such illumination as there was. And was it not lucky! You have never seen so sensational a display. Every mountain-peak was set afire, every house and every mountain-path lit with living (not electric) lights. Guns from the forts booming and echoing through the ravines. The same was done all along the fifteen miles of gorge. So magnificent was it that we determined to say “Thank you” by sending up some excellent S.O.S. rockets ourselves, and our Nannies gave a searchlight display, and in return for their serenading Mr Fletcher, the King’s piper, gave them “Over the sea to Skye,” walking round and round the deck, the King shouting explanations of bagpipes to the crowd.

  Corfu

  20 June

  Two Kings tomorrow night. It’s all a great treat. I think that I’m enjoying it as much as (No! more, much more than) anyone on board, partly because I’m so conscious of the occasion. The others seem to take it in their stride.

  I “took on” a lot about Greece. It looked wonderfully Homeric—brown rocky earth, ships like Ulysses’s (at least rigged the same), mountains capped in silver cloud, one of which may be Olympus. Some of the shipmates have never heard of the Olympians, nor do those who may have done associate them with antiquity. Godfrey Thomas has got the inevitable Baedeker 1906. The day was rather given over to fuss about the King of Greece. The King doesn’t say “George” or “the King” or “my cousin” but always “the King of Greece” which sounds to me La Belle Hélène musical-comedyish.

  Once anchored in Corfu, it was dressing up Aird to go and call on the King of Greece. We had sent a message to ask him to dine on board and had the reply that he was bringing six English guests. We can’t cope with so many. We haven’t covers or table-seating for sixteen, so Jackie Aird had to try to get us invited to his board instead. The same difficulty there—no time to get the crockery and plates, but they would call for a cocktail at 6.30. The evening dresses that had been brought out of their paper were put back and the robes d’après-midi ironed. We fixed our King up in white flannels and blazer and yachting cap. Wallis left us to arrange it all. They came and stayed two hours, and we behaved badly and were cliquish, catching each other’s eyes and yawning and looking miserable. The King played up best. The King of Greece seems quite altered by Restoration. He had lost five stone and some of his affability. His life, they say, is a very sad one. He has not one man he can trust or take advice from, and not one personal friend. He’s made himself more or less of a dictator, he says, though disapproving of dictators, and he is feeling the strain badly.

  Everything here is ruin—not classical, modern. No rich villas left, the Kaiser’s and the King of Greece’s both practically roofless. I had a lovely bathe and scrambled very painfully over razory rock to feel the soil of Greece.

  21–22 June

  All my spirit has gone. I feel suddenly like Hamlet at his most lugubrious. I was incapable of writing all day, but tonight I feel at least not ill, so I’ll try.

  Friday 21st was too strenuous for me. I got up at 7, and at 8 Duff and I were ashore trying to get our money changed into 74 drachmas, and also to get a motor-car. We found a very shoddy open green Ford on the quay. Speechless we got into it and pointed in the guide book to the name of a monastery on the other side of the island. The driver chattered back at us like a monkey and it all looked hopeless until a lounger walked up and in fair English explained that the car had been hired by the King of Greece, but that it would take us to the bank for the money and find us another car for the drive. This plan worked. The new car had no windscreen and no springs or stuffing, but it had an English-speaking man at the wheel. No charm in the streets of Corfu but great beauty on the other side of the island. Our goal was a place called Palæocastrizza. Every mile of the way got more lovely—cliffs into green sea with always deep caves for sirens, immense olives, fragrant smells, and of course utterly unspoilt by people or pumps or posters. We had a nasty little breakfast on a bay. Breakfast over, we went to a monastery on a hill-top where the bearded monks gave us bunches of verbena and herbs with delicious brand-new smells. We walked down—a longish walk through cypresses and olives where Greek girls with headcloths and aprons and bare feet tended their goats.

  Home again via the exterior of the King’s two palaces, one in the town, the other miles outside, both deserted and broken by successive revolutions, both built in excellent taste by the English Governor in Napoleonic times. The villa is called Mon Repos and a very desirable Regent’s Parkish (only better) house it is. The King of Greece means to restore these palaces but his throne is still too groggy to start spending money, and the country does not look as if it owned a drachma. Back to the boat pretty exhausted because the heat is prodigious. Poor Helen is wilting beneath it, but I don’t worry. Duff is baked to a cinder and does not know that it is hot; no more does the King.

  At 4 Wallis, the King, Duff and I went off in the launch to see the famous villa built by the Empress Elizabeth and bought by the Kaiser. We landed on the pompous broken quay and found to our horror that the gates of the demesne were heavily chained. The King began climbing, but there was barbed wire. A lot of peasants and fishermen were watching us when Mr Evans, the detective, and an Adonis dressed in the same clothes as the King, started fiddling with the chains, broke them, took pliers to the wire and opened it all up! I thought it a funny gate-crash for a King, but no one commented on it.

  Then came a forty-minute climb of beauty—one endless flight of steps bordered by symmetrical cypresses culminating in a charming 1890 statue of the Empress Elizabeth in marble skirt and collar of modish cut. The top when reached (dead with fatigue) showed a tremendous view and a colossal figure of Achilles erected by the Kaiser, and a house the size of Chatsworth of such hideosity that it takes seeing to believe. Pompeian in style. The electric light is installed with great fancy—baskets full of electric-light flowers, groups of plaster cherubs blowing electric-light bubbles. An amusing piece of furnitur
e is the Kaiser’s own writing-table. It consists of a high clerk’s desk, painted white and gold, and another little platform from which rises a pole crowned with a stirrupless saddle that revolves.

  I wondered as I slithered down the half-hour’s descent how the tight-laced and booted Edwardians had ever got to the sea. I decided that they never did, because why should they want to, non-bathers that they were? But I was wrong. It appears that they had a cavalcade of donkeys and bathed daily. Well, it’s another Castle Ichabod and I don’t want to see it again.

  Back fatigued to dress for the King of Greece’s dinner. Everybody making a great groan about it, but I thinking that “it will make a change.” I wore the grey organdie, but I was too tired to look as spry as necessary for that material. A couple of cocktails before starting at 8.45 did no good. We piled into the slow launch called Queen Victoria and chugged across a very wide bay, an even slower Greek launch piloting us. Of course we were a good hour late for 9.30 dinner and found the King of Greece twiddling his thumbs on the quay. He packed us into two open cars, himself at one of the wheels, and we hairpinned up a steep cypress-lined road and came to a magnificent villa rented for the summer. We sat out to dinner on a lordly terrace and the dinner was A.I. I sat next to the Greek King. I never got going at all, but I observed everything and watched our King turn to Mrs Jones next him (an exceedingly good-looking Englishwoman, whose soldier husband has just divorced her, or been divorced by her) and turn the charm on full force. Meanwhile Wallis, on the King of Greece’s other side, was doing splendidly, the wisecracks following in quick succession, the King clearly very admiring and amused. It went on until 1.30. I was nearly crying by this time. I suppose that I had done too much in too great heat: anyway the journey home made me almost unconscious.

  I woke on the 22nd no better, in fact rather worse than the night before. Panic set in. Was I going to be really ill? I did not know all day what to do with myself. The deck was too bright, the cabin too stuffy, legs ached, hands ached. I could not read because I could not keep awake, nor yet sleep for nervous jerks. We had left Corfu at dawn and were sailing to Cephalonia. It’s all very bare, but my eye was jaundiced. We tried to “make” a bay, nearly grounded the ship and as near as a toucher got rammed by a steamer.

  At 5 I forced myself to bathe and felt a little better. The King was in high spirits. He took a walk to the top of a hill in the early afternoon, then later appeared suddenly with an old shrimping-net on his shoulder, looking like a child of eight. He ordered out a dinghy and set about catching jelly-fish, while we all leant over the ship’s side shrieking “There’s a big one, Sir.” At meals he gets served last, with the result that there is never anything left for him. The fool stewards don’t realise it and go on passing the sauces and extras to his meatless plate, so that every day he has to say at least once: “Yes, but I do want something to eat.”

  I feel a lot better this evening. Panic over, and I know now that it was too much energy in too great heat and that I shall be all right tomorrow.

  Cephalonia

  23 June

  Woke up with new-spangled ore. The nights on deck are almost the loveliest part of the twenty-four hours. One is cool, breeze-blown, the stars are clear and one wakes up to new surprises every morning. Duff and I went ashore at 9, struggling to get a car to take us a drive round the island. The village was very primitive, so we were lucky to get the crazy vehicle we did get. We always forget what tortures of terror and vertigo we are taking on ourselves when we set forth on these expeditions. A man with a few words of English offered us a police escort. We refused in true British style, but under pressure we took a uniformed young gentleman along. It was a magnificent drive and took four hours. At one moment we had to get out and walk, for terror of the sheer precipice.

  Duff is really worse than me. These goat-paths, no wider than a car’s axle, with crumbling precipitous edges and a surface of shifting shingle, give him acute vertigo. I get only abject terror. He can shut his eyes at least, while I have to drive the car with hands and feet and eyes, but I can carry away a picture of the heights and cliffs and wine-dark sea. Poor Duff has only his lids to remember. We were well rewarded for our enterprise by hearing first a jangle of the most beautiful bells miles and miles away. They came from a strange Greek church with open belfry attached, of great architectural value. It seemed that anyone could run up and have a bang at the bells, and the result was a pleasant discord. The village was mouvementé to a degree. Even a few so-called cars were parked outside the church, and a lot of saddle-donkeys. We looked round the church which was empty and from there we heard the noise of a mourning crowd. We passed out through the opposite door, and there to our delight was Reinhardt’s Miracle (Orthodox style) and all the props, banners, crucifixes, reliquaries, candles, staves, choirboys, clergy, a tremendous bearded Archimandrite with a bulbous oriental gold crown on his head, an ornamental silver coffin with a visible Saint carried in a standing position, cripples and old chronics laid on the ground, moaning, praying, but alas! no miracle that we could see. Were we not lucky, though, to hit off the Saint’s feast, and the actual hour of his procession? We arrived back with something accomplished before the height of the mid-day sun, to find the others just coming out into it from their airless cabins.

  After lunch a siesta, well earned by us but the others have only just got up, so aren’t as keen about it. They wander about trying to find a cool place on deck, while the mad-dog English King rows for an hour or two or takes a strapping walk.

  Delphi

  There was a sudden movement last evening amongst the few that we had better go and consult the Oracle on our own or we might easily miss it. So the three (Duff, me and Godfrey Thomas) went ashore at 9 and hired a car and a guide, and buzzed up the parapetless road, preceded by eight soldiers jammed into a Ford car and followed by the same. What made the whole thing funny, as usual, was our clothes and the fact that nothing would persuade the natives that one of us was not the King. The guide said that it was no good. The more explanation given them, the surer they were that it was an incognito stunt. Even though we signed the book, our names were shown to another batch of our party who went to Delphi as the King’s signature.

  At 5 we went over to Glowworm to watch the crew play water-polo, an extraordinary performance and one that moved me very much. These splendid young men behaving like so many porpoises for half an hour in a swelling sea, not allowed to touch even a goal-post for rest, shouting at each other in Yorkshire and Cockney and Hebridean, all backgrounded with Greek mountains. The Captain entertained us in his boiling cabin packed with pictures of his “kiddies” (three of them) and good prints and objects of art collected by him with taste.

  At dinner (O the pity of it!) we watched the little town light itself up, and also the two villages, mountain-built in the middle distance, so the King said: “Let’s give them a show.” Up went half a dozen rockets, up went the White Ensign to the mast-top while the searchlight from Grafton played upon it. Godfrey ran in on the dinner-party saying “I’m afraid there’s been rather a bad accident. Glowworm hopes you will excuse her if she fails to give her display.” Captain Jessel, while bathing off the ship at twilight, had been run over by his own motor-launch and was most terribly injured. Glowworm had rushed him off to Patras, which was the nearest hospital. I think that we all felt sick and faint (I did) and Godfrey was so maddening in his sort of mysterious way about the injuries. “Most terribly cut about.” “Will he live?” I said. “That’s what we don’t know.” The mysterious tone gave one the idea that the wounds were unmentionable and Abyssinian, but before we went to bed we heard that both his legs had compound fractures, which (if that is all) is not too bad. The poor dear Captain with his joie de vivre and his “kiddies” haunted me all night. The King was greatly upset and fussed round sending messages and giving orders. When he settled down again, he said; “I’ve told them not to worry about us if we’re delayed. It doesn’t matter a bit.”

  Arrival in Ath
ens. Looks better than expectations. Other girls scouring the shore with glasses for night-clubs.

  Athens

  26 June

  The whole of Athens is a nice shape and colour. There is nothing atrocious to violate one’s associations (from the sea, I mean). The Acropolis through the glasses looks wonderful. Excitement was great. As Duff and I were trying to slip away independently, Sir Sydney Waterlow and a young attaché called Nicholls and a herd of Greek geese came aboard, so we had to stay and be agreeable. Sir Sydney has everything I ask for in a representative of H.M.G. Immensely tall, voice like Hutchie’s and Louis Mallet’s in one, and a look of blank astonishment like Harry Tate’s, yet completely uninhibited. On boarding the ship he said: “I’ve got plenty of splendid ideas”—this à propos of plans. He propounded them and the King accepted to go:

  (a) to the Acropolis at 6.

  (b) to the Legation for cocktails after.

  (c) to leave with the Minister at 3 tomorrow, motor for two hours, walk over the mountain for three hours and be back in the summer residence at 8.30, where the rest of the party should arrive at 9.

  Neither party quaked at the thought.

  Because of a general muddle of plans, Duff and I got the Acropolis to ourselves, also the full attention of the Head of the Fine Arts, who took us round and showed us the most beautiful of the seven wonders of the world. It isn’t only the proportions and the marble’s warm tone and the wonder of it—it’s the sky and the air and the arrangement of mountains and sea together with the human inspiration of the temple that give you a catch in the throat, and that strange restless sensation one had so often as a child (and very rarely now) that something must be done about it. Mere looking does not seem enough. This emotion disinclined me for a routine evening which lasted too long.