Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  Now all is restored. The carpets spread, “cushions within the chairs and all the candles lighted on the stairs.” Sir Joshua’s children are back upon the walls, and the living ones play hide-and-seek behind heirlooms. True, all these may within twenty-four hours turn again into grim hygienic wards, but we are thankful for today.

  Last April, I remember, the spring wrung my heart. It seemed like a child that had to die. Today either conditions or custom allow us a much robuster spirit. We “Dig for Victory,” we camouflage our houses dizzily from ladder-tops. Our fine motors are jacked-up for the duration in the garages of the still-rich, and we buzz about in grotesque little seven-horsepower motors. Mine is called Dodgems and is almost a teetotaller. When I send for the plumber to deal with some appalling sanitary disorder, two little boys of about ten arrive with a lot of jacks, jigs and jemmies, diagnose the trouble and bustle off to the next job. In fact it is the children’s spring.

  There is truth in these letters, but there were other moments as true and far less debonair. Gloomy lethargy clogged my limbs and mind. I sought out the doleful, the dejected and the apprehensive; these, because of contrariness, I thought I could encourage, but I felt that, like a leper, I should carry a bell and mutter “Unclean” before the buoyant and optimistic.

  We settled or rather camped in Chapel Street, with outings to Bognor. One dead-of-night Duff received a message from Winston, who, having been summoned to France for a conference, would not be able to address the Royal Society of St George. He asked Duff to take his place. Duff accepted, conscious of the responsibility of making such a speech at such a time, but it was one of the best speeches of his life. This was the peroration:

  Once more St George is mounted on his charger. He has never ridden in a nobler cause. He has as his opponent, or his quarry, the foulest monster that hell ever spawned. Germany has assumed many ugly shapes in her past—under the perjured pervert Frederick, miscalled the Great; under the mountainous bully Bismarck, with his treble voice, his sly and shifty diplomacy and his forged telegrams; under the vain, crippled Hohenzollern, himself the servant of the half-crazy Ludendorff, who so hated Christianity that he worshipped Odin and Thor—but none of these previous manifestations of the soul of Germany was quite so repellent as the little gang of blood-stained, money-making murderers who now are urging on the hordes of barbarism to the destruction of civilisation.

  Yes, St George is once more in the saddle. Have we not met him countless times of late throughout our countryside and in the streets of our cities? At this very moment he is going, laughing gaily, into battle by sea and land, high in the heavens and deep under the ocean waves. Either he will return with the laurels of victory on his brow, or else he will sleep well, his duty done and the name of England graven on his heart.

  The audience was electrified and I felt myself on St George’s pillion, clinging to his cloak, galloping to kill the dragon and rescue England. I must forge myself a sword, ride out the storm and stop funking the fray.

  Conrad was working manually on his Somerset farm for twelve hours a day, and was to work eighteen before the effort finally killed him. His letters continued:

  I have started Nevile Henderson’s book. He says on page one that he does not doubt that he was specially selected by Providence to go to Berlin in order that Peace might be preserved. The book is called Failure of a Mission. So who muffed it—Providence or Henderson?

  I feel sick at heart about Norway and the Prime Minister’s vulgar and idiotic comment: “Hitler has missed the bus.” The less Mr Chamberlain talks about missing the bus the better. Will people never realise that the Germans are clever and brave and well-organised? Their army is the best in the world and their air force ditto. Making foolish military mistakes and muddling incompetence are English and not German characteristics. God help us!

  Then I remember that we’ve never in all history done anything quite so idiotic as to entrust our country to a Führer or a Duce. Nor to a Stalin, nor to a Pétain. We get pretty good stinkers to govern us every now and then, such as Charles I, James II and even in our day, Mr Chamberlain. But it’s out you go! Other countries don’t seem to do this so easily. The French still greatly admire Napoleon—certainly the man who did France most harm.

  Disastrous April was upon us. I can remember moaning as I re-pasted my numberless orangery windows with sticky anti-blast tape, wondering what to do next. I could always sticky-tape the windows of our Bognor cottage, still packed with discontented refugees from London’s East End. And then what? Find war-work? I shrank from becoming a V.A.D. They were now to be paid and regimented into their rightful menial rank in the hospitals and not be allowed free run of the wards as I had been in 1914. Besides, on paper I was too old. I must wait on events as phenomenal and sudden as earthquakes and waterspouts, that would give me no choice and no weighing. The inevitable only would direct.

  Disastrous April brought the fearful fiasco of Norway, the horrifying stories told by eye-witnessing friends of defeat and chaos. England’s banks were pale with primroses, and I remember at sight of them thinking of those trudging the Norwegian snow who must be dreaming of these carpets. There was the shining day of Narvik when our Admiral Whitworth (he whose life-jacket in the Enchantress storm had been laid on his bunk like a boiled shirt while I was praying knee-deep in the débris of my cabin) became the hero of the day. Little countries in fell swoops were avalanched and temporarily obliterated. We knew that our turn must come before the irresistible invaders blasted their way towards France. There was too much, too much, and weaving through the alarms was the conviction of Parliament and the people that Winston Churchill must take the helm of our scandalised ship. He must shoulder our hopes and our efforts and imbue us with courage, or the ship would sink. With nothing yet to do, with irons waiting for a fire, I slunk round my fine London house, happy in that Duff would be part of this essential activity, one of the plotters and builders, and that he would be certain and relieved that the time was at hand.

  And now in April my flawlessly beautiful niece Isobel, with all the insouciance of her youth, said to me blithely at a party: “Papa has got pneumonia.” The word in those days to my foreboding mind spelt death, and though at that ugly time I thought of death’s calm as nearly enviable, yet for those who love and are left, war has no terrors. My brother John died too soon, long before life could pall. He left unwillingly his archives, his archaeology, his excavations and his collections of mediaeval tiles, his birds, his enthusiasm for nature and sport, his five children and his darling wife. He was the first of us four children to die, and my sorrow was fierce and isolated among the many sorrows.

  It was May and Whitsuntide when the juggernaut’s car bulldozed through Holland and Belgium, and on the same day Winston became Prime Minister of England. The phoney war had ended, and now we must wait for them to fahren gegen Engelland. Duff was made Minister of Information and felt himself to be the ideal choice. The American tour had confirmed his views on propaganda and the way it should be organised. So he was happy in spite of having to announce a succession of appalling calamities that befell us on the battlefields and on the seas. I had been gladly pressed into a Y.M.C.A. canteen in Parliament Square, while Conrad became in the first week of the shooting war a Local Defence Volunteer, along with a quarter of a million other bumpkins. He wrote:

  Mells

  16 May

  I hope that you are calm and cool. It is easier in the country. Employment is a boon. Fears may be liars, says poet Clough. I heard Duffy at six o’clock, quite excellent and dreadfully moving.

  I’ve enlisted in the Local Defence Volunteers against the Fallschirmspringer. It was done in Mel Is fashion, leaning over the gate in shirt-sleeves chatting with P.C. Marsh, our charming constable. He pointed out that as I should only have a rifle and the German a machine-gun, it was really a suicide club. I said grandly: “O, I don’t mind that!” My corps would be called the Fallschirmspringer-vernichtungsarme. Ask Raimund. It’s Cincinnatus called fr
om the plough. I don’t think it is right to give this job to a man in his grand climacteric. I’ve always hated soldiering and seem fated to go on and on until the grave. It was monstrous that I should have ever been in command of a squadron, and worse that I should have gone to the trenches in my fortieth year. Three of my boys (Mouldy, Feeble and Bullcalf) have just been in to report. England doesn’t change much.

  27 May

  I went to a meeting of Section Commanders today. Most looked too old to have been in the 1914–18 war. Major D is almost a Lord Cardigan type, deaf as an adder. Disagreement from me can do little good. I spent from 1915 to 1918 in profound disagreement with Lord Haig on the uses of cavalry, but it didn’t prevent him maintaining five divisions (about 20,000 sabres of cavalry). All now argue that Haig was wrong, and Yours Truly right.

  The carter said today: “I’m glad Duff Cooper went to America. He’s long-headed and a wiry little chap too.” The signposts are being taken down here. It strikes a terribly serious note.

  In early June Duff went to Paris on a mission. I was as usual in a pitiable state of tension when he left, to be made ten times more frantic the following day by a series of extraordinary accidents. I needed some money and asked my faithful Wadey to fetch it for me from Drummond’s Bank. In normal times it would not have struck me to suggest the taking of my passport as a proof of bona fides, but times were out of joint. So she made the inevitable search, and finding it she found also a letter addressed to me between its leaves. She brought it to me calmly enough, but the sight of Duff’s writing, coming, as it seemed, out of time and space, made my blood run cold. What I read made it colder. The letter was viatical. He felt certain, he said, that he would not return. He had walked in the garden that morning, at peace and surprised by his calm and his thankfulness for life and love. I must not over-grieve; all was ordained. It was a letter that as I read I felt he would never have written without complete conviction, yet presentiments (let alone fearful ones) were not for him. Or had he in the past concealed them for my serenity’s sake? Now he had written his words in my passport, that I might not open for years. Without a thought for anything but his succour, I grabbed the telephone and asked for Mrs Churchill at 10 Downing Street. “Listen, Clemmie, listen to this letter! You know how unlike Duff it is! O Clemmie, what shall we do?” Completely sympathetic, she answered: “How awful! I’ll tell Winston at once. He’ll send out some Spitfires. Don’t worry too much.” They were surely sent to escort the aeroplane back from Paris. On Duff’s safe return I was forced to admit my interference. He would have scolded me more roundly had he not been as astounded as I had been by these astonishing coincidences. Did I save him? An astrologer would have warned him of the unpropitious occasion. In astrology there is room for precaution and obstruction; the disaster is not inevitable. One can dodge the stars in their courses. What guided my hand and his on that same day to a laid-by passport? Were the German marauders there in wait, and did the Spitfires give them pause? It was very strange.

  So Duff came back to me, and together we fought on. We had left Chapel Street. It was too big and too difficult. Pictures were taken from the walls, china and such treasures as I possessed (also junk) were packed and sent to friends’ country houses, where they stood a better chance of survival. We moved into a top-floor suite in the Dorchester Hotel: from its high windows one could scan nearly all London beyond the green sea of Hyde Park, sprawled out for slaughter, dense with monuments, landmarks, tell-tale railway-lines and bridges. How red would the flames be, I wondered, when our hour struck? (They proved to be less fiery than I feared.) It was liberating to be houseless, and the high Dorchester was sunny and airy. A picture of my mother and one of John Julius were all that distinguished it from any other hotel room. One could see from the eighth floor whether the Ministry of Information was still standing. The high white building became symbolic to me, like Dover’s cliffs.

  The labour of a house-owner with rationed food and fuel, black-out and wardening, was gruelling. Everything was gruelling, and there was always so much to carry—a tin hat, a gas-mask (which one was advised to wear for half an hour daily but never did), a ration-card, petrol-coupons and a useless identity card. When parking one’s car for as much as five minutes, one was ordered to remove the distributor-head, rotor-arm or some unknown part. At night we travelled without lamps and stopped at traffic-lights reduced to a red or green cross, thin as a match. By day captive balloons were gay and gave a touch of carnival; the boarded shop-windows were sad but sensible. Already the sandbags were sprouting fresh grass and budding willow-herb. The weather was radiant, as it so often seems to be in catastrophic times. One night we groped our way into Max Beaverbrook’s house to learn what seemed the worst of all news. “How black can you take it?” said a friend as I came in. The Channel ports had gone. Now were we truly naked to our enemies. Italy was against us too, bitter but expected news.

  Conrad wrote:

  Mells

  10 June

  Ernest says: “It’s Duff Cooper who keeps us going.” He also says he’s always had a very poor opinion of the King of Italy—“a Nazi at heart he is,” and he says: “The Pope’s about the best of the Italians.” They talk about the Pope just as we might, and about “old Stafford Cripps” and “What’s he doing with old Stalin?” Everyone is called “old.”

  When my neighbour read about the Germans dropping parachute troops in Holland, he said: “Kind of damned silly thing they would do.” That’s the English officer’s attitude. The Germans are silly incompetent people and the German army opera bouffe. You have to have been at Eton and Sandhurst to know anything about fighting. O God, help us! Chores in Frome, and I left a tin marked “Teat Ointment” on the counter at the bank and had to go back and ask the cashier: “Have you seen my teat ointment?”

  I had taken on the earliest shift at the Y.M.C.A. canteen. It suited me, always mindless of what time I get up, being a bad sleeper and a bad dreamer. There was good cheer at 7 a.m. when the tired night-shift left, and the watchers, wardens and early workers came in for a splendid breakfast of porridge, eggs and bacon, butter and jam, with unstinted tea and sugar. Rationing did not exist in that hospitable Central Hall, run by my old friend Juliet Duff’s efficient daughter. Later, when the blitz began in its full ghastly force, it was to be my happiest refuge. Many of my fellow-workers had husbands and sons in France, and I used to marvel at their control, courageous smiles and energy through the desperate Dunkirk days. How did they manage to be so good, I wondered, and how did I manage to be so bad, with Duff by my side at night and in a massive office all day? Perhaps we all thought the same. We all looked the same, all awful, with blue overalls and tied-up heads. The work was, though not heavy, fortunately against time.

  Without reason the English felt better after the fall of France. I know I did. It was a challenge, which is always invigorating. Insane that it should have been so, but we had Winston to stiffen our sinews and teach us how to war. “We’re better on our own,” we said, and the new strength and independence showed in the faces and morale of all the people as they waited for their triumph or destruction.

  After Dunkirk we talked exclusively of parachutists, of how they would come and deceive us by being dressed as nurses, monks or nuns with collapsible bicycles concealed beneath their habits. An English uniform would have been a better disguise for the expected invaders. Orders and suggestions overwhelmed us. We must stay put (how does one do it?). We must not spread alarm or dismay (I must therefore hold my tongue). We must fill our ginger-beer empties with an explosive prescription, label it “Molotov Cocktail” and hurl it at the invading tanks. We were advised to feed the enemy’s cars with sugar to neutralise their petrol. Place-names were obliterated on roads and stations. Barricades of wagons and tree-trunks were successfully obstructing our own movements. We must “Be like Dad and keep Mum” (very funny, we thought), and the children must not have kites or fireworks. We had killed our black-widow spiders when war came, and now the Zoo’
s Home Guard were trained riflemen. To have been hugged to death by a bombed-out bear would have been an anticlimax. One zebra only got a run for his money and streaked round Regent’s Park pursued by the Zoo’s secretary, keepers and the public. We had all given our weapons, binoculars and dainty opera-glasses to the Home Guard. In June the ringing of church-bells was stopped, so that they might ring again for invasion. It sounded a topsy-turvy order. Their silence, and the darkened houses that betrayed no cheer or welcome and were no longer symbols of shelter, affected me acutely.

  A difficult suggestion that had a foolish appeal for me was to equip one’s car with an all-covering armour of small pebbles between sheets of tin. This naturally never materialised and I was disappointed. Buckets of water must stand everywhere possible, to be stumbled over in the dark, and one’s attic must be emptied of inflammable contents, which meant everything. The Local Defence Volunteers, now called the Home Guard, were increasing in millions. The Americans formed a detachment in our uniform, with red eagles on their arms. Mr Kennedy, the United States Ambassador, was said to disapprove, but we approved wholeheartedly. I do not remember the bombing of London being prepared against with the urgency that was given to invasion precautions. The German aeroplanes came over England, singly at first, then in squadrons, and soon was to be fought the Battle of Britain. We knew that this battle must first be won, and then would be time to think of what would fall from the sky, and orders for shelters, camouflage and improvised safety-measures begin in earnest.