by Diana Cooper
I felt the need for repeating in the Far East the institution of a Minister of State, who, in the closest touch with the War Cabinet, would relieve the Commanders-in-Chief and local Governors of some of their burdens and help them to solve the grave political problems which gathered swiftly. In Mr Duff Cooper, then Minister of Information, I had a friend and colleague who from his central point of view knew the whole scene. His firmness of character which had led him to resign his office as First Lord of the Admiralty after the Munich Agreement in 1938, his personal gifts of speech and writing, his military record as an officer in the Grenadier Guards during the 1914–18 war, combined to give him the highest qualifications. On July 21 he was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and succeeded as Minister of Information by Mr Brendan Bracken.
A tropical trousseau must be bought. I had lost my eye for and interest in clothes. Molyneux would deal with this deficiency. John Julius again was a thought to heal, but then I scarcely expected to get across the Atlantic, let alone across America, across the wide Pacific and to land in Singapore. What else, I remember wondering, had Time got up his horrid conjuror’s sleeve (if we lived) for Duff and for me?
Conrad wrote on 20 July:
I’ve seen it in the papers. I never expected anything else once you’d told me. Perhaps you are not off in a great hurry? But that’s only drawing out the horror, and I’ve spent the day numbed and aware that something dreadful is about to happen. One has no right to expect to be happy in these times, and on the whole we have got through the first two years better than expected, except for the American bit.
My last and sixteenth visit this summer to Bognor will be on Wednesday, and they have been the happiest days of my life.
CHAPTER FOUR
Fiery Portal of the East
“TREMBLINGLY obey,” wrote the old Buddha Empress of China in her edicts. I felt I was always obeying love, duty or conscience, and invariably I trembled as I kissed the rod. We travelled light (my heart alone was heavy) from some airfield in the West of England. I had flown once before on a so-called joy-ride for half an hour in Texas, not out of sight of the runway. The popping corks and holiday joviality of the millionaire hosts had not been an appetiser for future cloud-borne jaunts. I had made a silent oath never again, unless impelled by necessity, to brave the skies. Necessity was here, and here were we, accompanied by Martin Russell, Conrad’s young nephew, who had been seconded from the army to act as Duff’s secretary at the Ministry of Information. Here also were Conrad and Katharine Asquith to see the last of us. Martin too travelled light, but instead of a heart he carried a capacious Saratoga of secret papers. I hoped to be sustained by a bottle of blue pills that Vincent Sheean had given me against fear. I don’t remember their helping. We flew south over the Atlantic’s eastern coast and in a few hours were at Lisbon in blistering heat, with spirits mounting in thankfulness for recovered earth and the excitement of the unknown. The Ambassador, Sir Ronald Campbell, received us, and the flying-boat was said to be ship-shape, with deck cleared for action next morning.
I reported to Conrad:
British Embassy, Lisbon
7 August 1941
Imagine the anticlimax! We motored half an hour to the Tagus seaplane-port, got weighed, got passed, produced vaccination scars and certificates, swallowed our soothing pills, got our feet on the scaffold and were suddenly informed that the fourth engine was “missing” and that the trip was to be postponed for twenty-four hours. My heart sank. I was well teed up and still leaning on the confidence acquired yesterday, and the alternative of another hot day at the Embassy, unwanted and désœuvrée, yawned hideously. It was too hot to sightsee. I had thought Lisbon would be densely crowded with refugees, spies, journalists, the disinherited, the dispossessed, the neutrals, the Jews, the opportunists. I thought the streets would be jammed and the bars bursting and buzzing, but there was no one much about. We felt, as we were so often to feel waiting for aeroplanes, a weight upon the Embassy, not that the Ambassador was overworked. He sauntered round and was kind, but I don’t suppose he liked us much. Martin had funny ways that reminded me of my own, so that I hesitated to check him, i.e. picking a piece of long-cold bacon out of the breakfast sideboard dish, holding it high above his upturned face and slowly absorbing it by mouth while talking to the Ambassador. It reminded me of catching Duff’s reproving eye as I sucked through my asparagus for the third time while talking to Sir William Tyrrell at a Paris Embassy dinner.
Three heavy days we waited for the plane and at last we took off from the Tagus in a hot hurricane. In seven hours the unpleasant miracle landed us at the Azores—Horta green with rainfall and unsurprising. Then off again for twelve hours to Bermuda. I was new to flying and pretty miserable, strapped in as for the hot-squat, time out of joint, one’s head too chaotic to set it right. Jimmy Sheean’s azure scarab anti-fear pills perhaps helped, but not to read Virginia Woolf. Duff was better suited with War and Peace; it irritated me to see him crying so happily as he read.
When we arrived at the unvexed Bermoothes, an amusing Colonial Secretary took us a walk in the very empty Sunday dawn streets, not only no motors (by order) but no buggies about. Martin had not risked leaving the hush-hush suitcase, weighing two ton, with the neutral air-officials, so it had to come along on the tramp, a cruel burden on the poor boy’s arm, sometimes carried like a baby (the handle being groggy). I did not think it a particularly attractive island, like Nassau, but then presumably we did not see the enchanted parts—no green shades for green thoughts, no prancing negroes in white boots and crude-coloured muslins gossiping in Parliament Square, which is how I remember my Bahamas.
Up again into the blue after two hours’ respite, during which all the mail was opened and censored. It wasn’t long before the flat shore of Long Island appeared with its symmetrical blocks of buildings, car-parks, smart properties, each with its green swimming-pool, and then in another few minutes we make a superb landing.
Our progress was detailed for Conrad:
There was a sort of grandstand with thousands of people packed in tiers, and in the complete density of this crowd I saw the most good-looking little grinning face of John Julius, flanked by Kaetchen, the foster-parents Paley and the Hofmannsthals. We were a long time with doctors, customs-officials etc. and another hour with photographers and movie-men. Then at last I got my dear child in my arms and felt most happy. He really is lovely looking, not grown too much or with a cracked voice, not nasal or spotty or downy-chinned, in fact not wearing spats and married, as I had feared to meet him next when I waved him goodbye at blacked-out Victoria two years (no, one-and-a-bit) ago, but slim and straight and fair as an Angle or Angel. We were again hours in a sound-proof room while Duff made newsreel talkies without any effort. The heat was grim and we had to listen respectfully to Queen Elizabeth broadcasting from England, not one scrambled word of which I could hear. At last it was all through and we whizzed off to the Paley home to find Nanny crying with excitement.
In my bedroom I found fruit on a daintily laid tray, and in the cupboard aspirin, witch-hazel, peroxide, a bottle of “Soporific” bath-powder, one of “Soporific Rub” and another labelled “Soporific Nightcap,” some earplugs and an eye-bandage. They are determined to get me to sleep. There are radio sets, televisions and, thank God, plenty of pianos, so although John Julius clearly has no incentive to read a book, he plays for pleasure with a sensitive touch and much facility.
John Julius’s treat was a day in Washington:
The news of the Atlantic Meeting had just broken and Max Beaverbrook was due to arrive. We were told we could lunch alone as Duff and the Ambassador were attending a public feast, or a party could be fixed for us. We opted for freedom and a drug-store lunch, shook Embassy dust off our feet, and visited the Lincoln Memorial. I read the famous words on the wall and was as usual deeply impressed by the marble man in trousers who stares out of his shrine at the Capitol and far horizons. From there we went to the Federal Bureau of Investi
gation, where Mr Hoover’s G-men are trained. I’d done it before and knew it would go well with John Julius. He shot at targets shaped like men with tommy-gun and tracer bullets. We both had our finger-prints permanently filed in the Department of Non-Criminals. We read letters dictated to pathetic parents of kidnapped children, and altogether had a wonderful time. We ate an expensive lunch with a mint julep and had an encouraging talk with the 100% American waiter about how Lindbergh ought to be in jail or shot for being pro-German. We looked at the White House and returned on appointment to the Embassy. The turmoil there was most amusing. The arrival of Max always creates pandemonium and fear of consequences. The camera-boys and movietone men were in their legion. Charles Peake looked distraught. I saw Max for a flash in the passage. He said, as he kissed me, “I’ve come over to see you.” I replied “I knew you would,” and that was all there was to it. Lord Halifax was the only one who seemed detached and calm. He has an attractive little dachshund (typically enough) whose vice is to pull pyjamas from under pillows and bring them to the hall.
We leave New York tomorrow and our China Clipper takes off 26 August from San Francisco. There our Eastern expert joins us. I met him in Washington and was prepossessed. His name is Tony Keswick, about thirty-six years old, and married to a Lindley girl. He is the man Duff most wanted to poach.
Duff went back to Washington and saw the President. He said he was like a child about the Atlantic Meeting. He had so loved the secrecy and giving the police and the press the slip, and sailing through darkness in a strange ship, while his own ship steamed home in a blaze to decoy and confuse. I saw Henry Bernstein, très bien portant and obviously having a swell time in a smart apartment, furnished with his own works of art. He is sound as an English bell, and a very good example to the English refugees who bore one’s pants off with explanations of why they are over here, how longing they are to be back, and the rest of it. One is at a loss for an answer. Eve Curie too is here. She has been deprived of French nationality, and therefore cannot go to Lisbon, so can’t lecture, not having enough straw for her bricks. Considering we offered every Frog dual nationality, I think we might accord a prominent Free Frenchwoman a British pass. Emerald I did not see again, as she went to Atlantic City with Thomas Beecham. It’s Blackpool and she thinks it’s Cannes.
Claire Luce, a great beauty, alarmingly intelligent and not universally loved, gave me only two bits of information about the Pacific crossing and our mission: (1) that this was the typhoon season, (2) that all women had been evacuated from Singapore. I feel far, far away and yet I’m not halfway to my goal.
San Francisco
Duff had to make a speech at a big men’s lunch, so I walked for two and a half hours through Chinatown, enjoying my liberty and buying as usual a large Chinese straw hat. I tried to buy some airmail stationery, but they only had it in sheets two yards long and quite narrow. A nice old couple stopped me in the street and asked me the way. I told them that I was straight from London, whereat they both seized my hands and wrung them until they hurt, saying “Mighty pleased to shake your hand. Mighty pleased indeed.”
All the Pan-American schedules had the same snakes-and-ladders hazard of routing in their infancy as today in maturity, so back to Los Angeles we flew and then disembarked on to a rollicking raft (an artificial island) to refill, and there on the raft was my darling Iris Tree and her giant son. She, and only she, had wangled her way, grinning and well-dressed as Lord Fauntleroy. The Pacific lay ahead and those left behind said: “Good luck.” It used to be said to people bound for the front line. It made my hair stand erect as I climbed the scaffold steps into the China Clipper.
“The sky’s the limit.” Tomorrow we should be at Honolulu. I’ll write steadily from now on. It helps me in the plane to feel in touch with you. Distance is a great obliterator, as great as Time unless one watches it.
Next day
At five I woke to a scarlet glow of sunrise and the steward saying we should land in an hour. This was much earlier than I had hoped, and there was a general scramble of dressing behind curtains, legs and arms shooting out of tents, queueings for the lu and the rest of it. There was Hawaii beneath us, looking as every place does from the sky. Soon we were on the water and landing on to a grove of hibiscus and palms and two honey-coloured hula-girls giving us garlands and tumblers of pineapple-juice. Very lovely, very theatrical. They wore green reed-skirts with dew upon them, and their long hair pinned with blossom. Of course the disillusion came. We were longer at the Customs than their engagement lasted, so we saw them walking away, hatted and shod, just half-caste Broadway girls. A long drive across the island, through furiously active defence-preparations (much building also for Service residents), then through the completely American town of Honolulu to Waikiki beach, some ten minutes out, where our gigantic pink hotel is situated.
28 August
Today I went surf-riding at 8 a.m. with Tony Keswick. What an experience! A beach boy lays you on your stomach on a surfboard, separates your legs and takes his own kneeling position in your fork. He tucks your legs tightly along his calves and proceeds to paddle you out to the birthplace of the breakers. He then dismounts and shoos you off on the back of a wave. One is supposed to stand up, but I did not even attempt it. It is nice—rather—when it works, which is seldom, or when the boy comes along riding you, as he might a dolphin through the foam.
Afternoon succeeded afternoon in forcible feeding of lotus. Claire Luce arrived with heavy news of delay through tintinnabulating tee-hee laughter. It was off, it was on. Telegrams buzzed to the State Department from Mr Peck, our fellow-flier and the United States Minister to Thailand. We were marooned and cross. Rows increased. I remember a horrid one with a General who told me that he hoped for America’s sake we should fight for another fifteen years. “Tough on you, but the best that can happen to you. You’re all so soft you don’t deserve any better.” Soft! The grey embarrassment of the bystanders was my passive revenge.
Duff was morose. Tony Keswick did what he could palliatively. Martin gave up coming out of his room. Then, at outrageously long last, we were boarding the Clipper with Claire Luce, who rather enjoyed my squirms and encouraged them by saying that the trip was fated. She could hear the engines missing, she said, and followed her pearly-voiced words with her little tsee-tsee-tsee silvery laugh. She was beautifully dressed, to my covetousness, in sand-coloured slacks, jacket and close turban to match. At night she added gold ornaments and a correct bag. Myself I saw as someone at the end of a bank holiday, carrying a multitude of things won at the fair, a hat, a Japanese umbrella, some flowers. Tony Keswick had all the wild and fearful Atlantic, that was bearing his wife and pretty chickens, in his anxious eyes and mien. Duff had finished War and Peace and was back at Balzac. Mr and Mrs Peck clamoured for bridge and got it. Martin looked sick and was for ever writing cabalistic signs—chess or algebra problems, or a treatise headed “Political Warfare.” He was also the only passenger who needed exercise on the aeroplane. It was as though you walked a mile in a small Pullman car. He found difficulty in getting comfortable in his seat, turning round and round in it like a dog in an inconvenient basket.
I learned that to question the staff was useless; answers bore no relation to truth. Arrivals and departures came on this strange journey always as a surprise. To see an island ten thousand feet below, inchoate as an oyster, made me want to cry some word of triumphant relief—Thalassa’s opposite.
We first folded our wings at Midway, not the Robinson Crusoe island I had hoped for with three coconut-palms and some spoor, but flat, sprawling and infernally hot, made up of dredgers and oil-tanks. Wake, the next stage, was the same, a blinding coral beach with just-good-enough little grass hotels. The Good Men and Women Fridays marooned there had not only lost all touch with the outer world but also any interest in it, and concentrated on birds, crabs and cactus-pollination. The passengers would lie in the shallow waters with their heads out, motionless like so many hippopotami; above them screeched t
he goons circling perpetually night and day. Pan American had disturbed their rest, changed their habits, created suspicion, and they dared not land. On the other hand I remember very adjusted little sitting rats in the brush that I explored, tame with no offence in them. In the brush also I found an escort. He wore the Pan American cap and spectacles. He came from Guam, he said, in faultless school-acquired English. (He told me en passant that Magellan had never circumnavigated the globe. He had died in Guam and only his ship made full circle.) My guide’s ambition was to be a chartered accountant, his interests were art and politics. He loved England which had produced Shakespeare, author of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
Guam came next, infinitely more sophisticated and mountainous with little Bovril-coloured men and huge horned cattle, typhoon-battered Catholic churches with ever-open doors through which shone the candles of the Mass. Manila, the penultimate landing, was complete sophistication, air-conditioned rooms, a President to call upon, but ladies still wore a national dress, Spanish in origin, with a sweeping frilled train. The high transparent and bespangled stick-up sleeves are made of pineapple-fibre. The dyes are bright, the effect dragon-fly. I bought one but it burnt, with so much else, on the quays of falling Singapore. Natives trot around in minute scarlet hansom cabs (driver inside) as delicate as fuchsias and as springy. They carry two carriage oil-lamps and are drawn by sleek lively little ponies.