by Diana Cooper
I telephoned the news to Winston, whose voice broke with emotion. I could hear him crying. Many people felt bitterly about Duff’s action. He had stained a perfectly radiant day and made some feel outraged and others conscience-struck. My pride in him glowed brightly, but there was much to be faced and much to be lost. A friend in Paris wrote to Lord Louis Mountbatten:
I did not think that one solitary statesman of the four Powers who sold Czechoslovakia could possibly emerge with honour from the crisis, but yesterday your First Lord emerged with great honour.
Captain Frend of the Enchantress wrote to Duff:
If you had been on board when the news came through, you would have appreciated how much you are respected and liked by all on board by the gloom that descended on the “little ship.”
I was in the House of Commons to hear Duff’s speech of resignation. Such speeches come before any other business, and the House was impatient to get it over and listen to Mr Chamberlain, the hero of the day. What Duff said was masterly and moving. A note from Winston was handed to him as soon as he sat down: “Your speech was one of the finest Parliamentary performances I have ever heard. It was admirable in form, massive in argument and shone with courage and public spirit.” From the Left Josiah Wedgwood wrote: “Love and admiration more than you have dreamt of will I hope compensate for loss of office and salary. Anyhow this old colleague from better days is proud of you. Also I think it is a good spot on a bad page of English history. I do dislike belonging to a race of clucking old hens and damned cowards.” The Times Lobby Correspondent, a dear friend called Anthony Winn, reported Duff’s speech and what had been thought of it. His account did not accord with the policy of the paper. It was therefore suppressed and a piece by the Editor inserted instead, headed “From our Lobby Correspondent,” describing the speech as “a damp squib.” Anthony Winn resigned next day.
I am truthful when I say that what sadness I felt for the loss of Duff’s position, the beautiful house and the yacht that went with it, and all its many splendours and advantages, was immediately comforted by my relief and pride—relief that at last was laid the spectre often with me of ambivalence, a spectre laden with doubts and fear of borrowed judgment. Many of the political wives with wavering husbands were sure and unbending as steel. Should I have been so trusty without Duff’s fiery lead? This haunting bogey was forgotten anyway for a while. Lord and Lady Stanhope succeeded to the dolphins and the improvements, Captain Cook’s paintings, the Nelson bust and relics. The mermaid came with me. Duff’s name was added to the graven tablet of First Lords and his picture hung in the passage. After a few weeks of answering, with my help and five secretaries, the many thousand letters from Czechoslovakia and all parts of the world, we left the Admiralty for ever and spent a quiet week at Trianon. I remember being very happy, proud and calm. The lovely autumn days healed and strengthened us. The statues and groves were half-buried in dead leaves. There was a refreshing melancholy in the past glories. Daisy Fellowes lent us her motor-car. We read aloud and went occasionally to Paris for a play. The Aga Khan, a true friend for twenty-five years, took us to dinner at a famous country restaurant and stayed arguing about Munich at our hotel until 4 a.m. “Why did you do it, dear boy?” he reiterated, “Why did you do it?” As an avowed admirer of Hitler he could not see the case against appeasement.
Our honeymoon over, we moved into the house that my mother had built for me with loving thought and ingenuity. 34 Chapel Street was a little too elaborate and above the capacity of our straitened fortunes. Duff on his resignation had been offered a lucrative engagement to lecture in the United States, but had refused it, as he had already agreed to write for a year a weekly article in the Evening Standard. He had suggested the autumn of 1939 as an alternative date for the lecture-tour. These contracts should help us to realise Rex Whistler’s design for our library. The work was started, but nine months was not enough to give it birth, and for reasons of war it was never finished.
The New Year took me and John Julius to the snows, to Mont Genève, where Hannibal crossed into Italy goading his elephants before him. Across the frontier in blatant letters was written: “Mussolini a sempre ragione.” I told John Julius never to forget the idiocy of the words.
I wrote to Duff:
My nerve has gone. It’s the humiliation of not being able to pick myself up which is so mortifying. Whether my muscles are degenerating or whether the snow is in too engulfing a condition to allow my anyway diseased limbs (Herb’s disease) and doubly-broken leg to fight it I don’t know. I do know that I’m the picture of Humpty Dumpty and often too in-pieces to rise. If people are passing I have to be dealt with as Sir John Falstaff would have been. Two helpers pulling, others excavating the snow beneath and levering me up, and then crash! I go down again as I’m saying “Merci.”
I feel better. I could not forbear flying at Mademoiselle for telling me how tired I looked, “et beaucoup, beaucoup changée.” Is it drink and rich food? Is it escapism? Is it climate? How can I be acutely and absurdly miserable in England? And so conscious of the weight of misery falling from me like Christian’s burden when away? It’s perplexing and despairing, for I want to love my life as it deserves to be loved. I can be utterly thankful for my condition and above all things for you. Age doesn’t worry me, or deterioration, loss of lovers, death of friends. It’s introspection, disease of apprehension, lack of interest. Try and guide me, my darling.
Ideal snow conditions. John Julius and I have not gone back since last year. That isn’t to say that we are not disastrously bad and quite uncontrolled. It’s the air and light above everything that make prowess always within one’s grasp, and then never being tired surprises. You can wake in the morning or after a rest quite battered, feeling that you can’t ever move again and don’t want to. Then as soon as your eyes see and your feet touch the snow you are whole and light and jubilantly active. Perhaps the snow’s a witch like the sea or a South Sea island and takes you from all you love and all stability, and finally smothers you and keeps you for centuries in regions of thick ribbed ice, and sends you imperceptibly back to the dust of the earth.
No letter from you. Two from Conrad, but he writes ahead as Mother always did.
John Julius plays a game of geography with all the French children. It’s just what I want for his language. They gabble and scream. I have to invent questions for the places on the map. The booklet that goes with the game is too advanced. Edmond (a boy of eleven) has never heard of Chicago. His father didn’t know Mecca. John Julius always knows Port au Prince and Banff and Antananarivo.
It’s going to snow. As I opened my window, which is the whole of one end of the room, it was fog that bulged in instead of the light of immense stars.
Later. It snowed and snowed and now the sun is breaking through and all my room is full of sun and cloud. Clouds are racing across, sometimes over my bed. It’s like a fairy dream or even a stage effect portraying the River of Life or Eternity or delirium.
The snows melted and brought us back to the last year of uneasy peace. An optimistic calm lay upon England to the casual observer, but behind many doors anxiety was waxing. We waited for war. Duff was writing his weekly articles for the Evening Standard and, according to one of the many letters fulminating with abuse that he received, “keeping his fellow-countrymen in a constant state of jittery anticipation, and endlessly fanning the flames of prejudice and hatred against the wicked Nazis on account of their supposed acts of aggression.” He received too a remarkable letter from his brother-in-law, Herbert Hindenburg, nephew of the Marshal (to me “Uncle Paul”). Duff’s half-sister, Marie Hay, had been married to this German for forty amicable years, and had just died. His letter berated Duff for his outrageous attitude towards the Führer and asked him on the same page to do all he could to advertise his (Herbert’s) newly published memoirs. His dead wife he did not mention. Staunch Tommy Bouch was meanwhile writing a stinging letter to our constituency agent, repudiating the Conservative Party and wi
thdrawing his subscription.
March brought us the occupation of Prague by the Germans and soon after, on Good Friday, the Italians crashed into Albania. Cassandra’s prophecies come true were infuriating our opponents and inexplicably solidifying their heads. We waited in our new house in Chapel Street and at our Bognor cottage. There was a general rather sinister tendency not to make summer plans. I see that we went to Paris in April for a meeting of Pan-Europa. Coudenhove-Kalergi (the movement’s mainspring) was one of my heroes—good news from Tartary. In him East and West met most felicitously, both physically and spiritually. A big Paris theatre had been taken and hung with Utopian flags. I sat in a box with Madame Kalergi, who blacked out my senses by telling me she felt sure that either my husband or hers (or both) would at any moment be killed on the platform by a bomb.
In June I must have felt a flash of hope, or the need for a flutter, so I visited the school at Le Rosay where only very tentative arrangements could be made for John Julius’s year abroad. I wrote to Conrad:
In the train
June 1939
It’s Geneva ho! I’m off to see about John Julius’s school and to look at the Velasquezes still cowering in some gallery, safe from their Civil War.
I’m enjoying ecstatically the fun and bustle of the journey which I’ve arranged in a flash to my individual taste, i.e. the most uncomfortable way possible and the cheapest. I’ve left Victoria with very little money (banks were shut) and I board the Dieppe boat at 9.45 p.m. (second class). At 2 a.m. I get on the Paris train which I get out of at 6.30 a.m. I cross Paris and catch the 7.30 a.m. to Geneva, arriving 3ish p.m. I go straight to the Exhibition and on to the school, dine with Carl, perhaps do some sightseeing by night, and at dawn catch the train back to Paris, take in Anthony Eden’s lecture and dine with ultra-“sound” Mr Michael Wright, catch the first train next morning to the Newhaven boat, stop off to tell Maurice the news at Rottingdean, have my car driven by the egregious Holbrook to meet me there, and roll up at Bognor at 6.30. Not everyone’s idea of fun, but perfect for me!
I’ve got no French language, which makes me fearful, embarrassed, tongue-tied and befogged with Carl. That’s the fly in my ointment. Then I have two books about Byron (“Ne crede Byron”), the crossword, and I sure feel larky. How will the farmer take it? Admiringly, I hope, with only a soupçon of jealousy. I wouldn’t want you to spur me on as a husband does—and did.
I began to write to you as I would to a foreign lover (or as I mean you to think that I do), starting “Mon cher amour,” but truth to tell I couldn’t get on with it, because I can’t write a love-letter in French or English or any language. I can only “say it” in loving looks, in ways and service, in sacrifice and fortitude, and sometimes on the telephone. The “Captain” can say it in masculine cries, and Lord Adare says it (to me) in Limerick sausages. Carl says it in conundrums. You say it best in letters, in words, in desire to please, in butter and eggs, Easter eggs and jimmy o’ goblins, my sweet farmer. Heaven! I hear the tinkling tongue often. Lovers, to bed!
Now were the days numbered and we were counting them by the shore of the sea that no longer served us as a wall. Near by in the Sussex Downs lived Euan with his wife and five sons. The days were long and, as I see them now, particularly radiant. I remember feeling that all they lit had the poignancy of a child that has to die. At Horsham was Hilaire Belloc, wonderfully detached from events of dread, still singing and discoursing and rollicking and concealing his Christ-like attributes. Maurice Baring at Rottingdean was enduring with saintly fortitude a slow and merciless overthrow. Weekly I went to see him sitting in his garden and later bedridden by his painful paralysis. He did not yearn for death, though every day was racking and his nights were without rest. His valiance was never daunted. He could no longer write, and to hold a book was all but impossible. Two little triolets I must record:
My body is a broken toy
Which nobody can mend.
Unfit for either play or ploy,
My body is a broken toy,
But all things end.
The siege of Troy
Came one day to an end.
My body is a broken toy
Which nobody can mend.
My soul is an immortal toy
Which nobody can mar.
An instrument of praise and joy,
My soul is an immortal toy
Which nobody can mar.
Though rusted from the world’s alloy
It glitters like a star.
My soul is an immortal toy
Which nobody can mar.
(These poems may be misquoted. Lord Ribblesdale, the “Picturesque Peer” painted in Sargent’s best manner at the Tate Gallery, told me, when I was too young to believe him, that it was gentlemanly to get one’s quotations very slightly wrong. In that way one unprigged oneself and allowed the company to correct one.)
These visits, which had continued for years, used to make me dreadfully sad. I would dress my best to please him (for he had high standards of a grander epoch) and gather a load of gossip and jokes and secrets and plans for better days (he never gave up hope), but for all his laughter and good spirits I felt my offerings insufficient and beggarly, and myself a shadow of what I wanted to be. He had a nurse who devoted her life to him at the expense of her family happiness, and a blue budgerigar called Dempsey who sat on his head or shoulder night and day, chattering unintelligibly into his ear, making to Maurice perfect sense that he communicated to me—often whole lines in the Chinese tradition: “The pear-blossom floats on the sad waters where alone I sit.”
During these last two months of summer the apocalypse was shadowed ahead as certainly as the twilight signals the night. I do not suppose that the people who came to laugh and bathe and drink and picnic at Bognor can have felt quite as despondent, quite so near yielding to despair, as I did, but they too were doubtless in disguise. I was lucky in that my son was still so young, and my husband too old for the Army, but I counted myself no happier than my sister Letty or Barbie Wallace, each with five sons, for death I knew was to take the lot of us without discrimination like the peoples of Sodom and Gomorrah, suddenly by fire and cataclysm, without quarter, without dignity. Many of our circle had already died. Edwin Montagu, then Michael Herbert and his brother Sidney, had been pressed into untimely graves. Others had joined our company—the Ronald Trees, Rothschilds, Cranbornes and Walter Elliots. My nephews and nieces were growing up. Liz Paget, by marrying Raimund von Hofmannsthal, had made him legally one of our closest. The colours of our private society flew bravely enough. Our last picnic on Ha’nacker Hill betrayed no faint hearts. There on the green Sussex Down stood the old mill, its sweepers gone, its clapper still:
Ha’nacker Hill is in Desolation:
Ruin a-top and a field unploughed.
And Spirits that call on a fallen nation
Spirits that loved her calling aloud:
Spirits abroad in a windy cloud.
Spirits that call and no one answers;
Ha’nacker’s down and England’s done.
Wind and Thistle for pipe and dancers
And never a ploughman under the Sun.
Never a ploughman. Never a one.
A favourite Belloc poem, often recited by him and by us, had come true, I felt.
*
On that day in August I saw the picture of desolation as clear as truth and, as I thought, for the last time. A contemptible idea kept tapping in my mind, hard to accept and impossible to banish, an idea that I could not share with Duff until it forced me to confess. It was possessing every part of me as I stared at the old mill and as we opened our hampers and grabbed merrily for food and Austrian white wine with which to toast the future.
The next day, 1st September, found John Julius and me bustling down Bognor High Street buying sweets, my Idea and presaging voices muted by the lively crowd and the laughing boy when, out of the emptiness of a parked motor-car, I heard the radio’s smug and soulless announcement that Ge
rmany had invaded Poland.
There was no doubt whatever in my mind that this meant the Second War. Duff would be killed in a trench in France, so would all the mothers’ sons. It would be 1914 repeated, ending with total obliteration. Yet the dread and anticipation of despair armed me for the first assault. The news meant little enough to John Julius, bent on the thrills of the Fun Fair, and truth to tell a resigned calm fell upon me. Before so world-shaking a catastrophe time stops, the stormed mind reels and lags, waiting for pain to penetrate. The communiqué’s words turning repeatedly and almost meaninglessly in my head, we bought lobsters for Duff’s dinner, somehow dodged the Fun Fair and returned home to await worse alarms—to wait for the declaration of war, for Duff to put on his old khaki and march off, followed by my seven nephews and Rex Whistler, to an obscure and muddy death, while the rest of us, frantic with terror, jammed and static in a narrow exodus, were bombed to extermination beneath our razed towns. I had forgotten that Duff was nearly fifty and no longer svelte. So apparently had he, for already a month before he had been to his tailor and ordered a Second Lieutenant’s first-war Brigade of Guards uniform, puttees, Sam Browne, tin hat, water-bottle and all. His touching preparations for war had wrung my heart and bowels as completely as thoughts of a million casualties.
And there he was at the cottage door, looking for all the world relieved. He had spent the morning at Goodwood playing golf very badly and without power to concentrate. In the club-house after the round he had found two men, one of whom he knew, discussing future race-meetings. As he left the bar, one man had said, “Hitler started on Poland this morning.” Duff asked him his meaning. He replied that the Germans had invaded Poland and bombed several cities. He then turned back to his friend and went on talking about the St Leger. “That was how I heard,” wrote Duff in his diary, “that the second World War had begun. As we drove back to Bognor my heart felt lighter than it had felt for a year.”