Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  En route

  How will it end? Duff got off all right, asking no questions but resigned and kind. The train is dandy. It started on the wrong leg for me by the Station Master coming up and saying that the Somebody didn’t like me travelling in the Number Two train, so was having his private saloon hitched on at Tamping. First blow!

  3.15 p.m.

  Adventure No. 1. Arrived at Tamping looking exceptionally grubby in dress that “can’t hurt,” sun-hat, bare legs and dusty dark-blue shoes instead of the Chinese-cleaned white ones. Met by an official who has shown me into a private coach for twenty with dining-table, bureau, large radio, two nice bedrooms, shower, vast white armchairs and observation-platform. I’ve wandered round it like Beauty round her empty palace. It’s very windowed and the Malays, Chinese, Tamils, Eurasians, paddy-workers and buffalo are staring in at this poor fish in her gilded tank.

  Malacca

  Next morning I hired a nice car with Malay driver (no communication possible) and after picking up enough shells to make a necklace and bracelets on the yellow sands, I started off on a seventy-mile drive to Batu Pahat (“Carved Milestone”). The country was faery. The ground is a looking-glass of water, the growing rice-fields of tender vivid green, the sweet water-buffalo pulling plough and ploughman under water and pulling also carts with long pagoda-roofs made, I think, of painted palm-leaves. We came to Mau (“Want”) and crossed by ferry into a little port-town. Ten miles beyond, still in this very rural country of rice and coconut-groves and small carved wooden Malay houses, grass-roofed, stilted, each with a pompous flight of marble stairs hooked on to the front door to give grandeur, we were bowling through a bit of a village quite slowly when three Chinese children ran out. The driver, whom I was sitting next to, honked and braked for all he was worth, but nothing could save one of them and a sickening noise and bump told me that we had run it down. The Malay hated stopping, but I crashed on the brake myself and, getting out, found a green, bleeding child of three, seemingly dead, on the road and a mother baying like a dog. It was dreadful, Conrad, in one flash to be taken from happiness and plunged in such horror. The impotence too of no language. I tried the word “doctor” but no understanding. There was none, I supposed. Then the word “hospital” mispronounced seemed to ring a bell. The village was out by now, gabbling advice; the driver was gabbling maniac-wise, justifying the accident, I imagined, with shades of the prison-house in his heart. I bundled the poor howling mother into the car, clinging to her broken-doll child. Quite dead it looked, with glazed slit eyes. We drove ten hideous slow miles back to Mau. All the way she bayed without tears, her open mouth filled full of gold (the mouth is the Malay Chinese’s bank). The driver never drew breath trying to prove, no doubt, his blamelessness. The woman pressed the child’s flat face into her flat chest. I could not persuade her by gesture to give it air, not that it mattered, as I was confident that it was dead. She kept doing such strange things to it—instinctive things—but to what purpose I could not figure out—articulating its legs sharply, thrusting her fingers into its mouth, perhaps against death’s rigidity.

  At last, when I felt nearly desperate, we drove up to the loveliest hospital you ever saw. Outside the town, with air and sun and gardens, roses round the door and long cool wards, a competent English doctor and two young executive Sisters. The Chinese woman had total confidence in the strange skill and gave the child gladly. She was taken away to be soothed, while the victim was rushed to the theatre. I was soothed too, given tea and Marie biscuits by the nurses, all so English. The doctor returned and said that the child was not dead and had head injuries, no more, and would in all probability recover. An officer in uniform arrived and said that he was the local bobby and took my testimony. The driver was put out of his terror but kept to be cross-examined, while I was sent off in the bobby’s car with a driver without an idea of the way. The child’s father arrived before I left. I felt glad that I had seen British health-schemes work so well, and the natives’ confidence and lack of suspicion.

  Not many weeks later we were off again, this time to Burma and India, both unbroken grounds to me. The Mission had taken shape and direction. In Sir George Sansom, Duff put all his faith and full agreement that war with Japan must come. Sir Archibald Clark Kerr flew from Chungking to confabulate, as did Sir Josiah Crosby from Bangkok. The report was worked on by Duff and his staff assiduously.

  So now India and Australia remained to be probed and consulted. Of the beauty of Penang we saw what air-travel allows—the airfield—and political reasons forbade us leaving just such another field at Bangkok. We crossed jungled mountains, where for once I forgot fear and experienced an artistic ecstasy difficult to describe—almost mystical. It had to do with colour, atmosphere and strangeness. Nothing was the same as I knew it, neither sea nor land nor sky. I thought that perhaps I was dead, and how beautiful it was. Rangoon brought me to earth in every sense, a dirty beast of a port, all dredgers, oil and cranes. Still the Indians were dressed in fraise-pink which married ill with their discontented faces. There were Colonel Miller and Captain Richmond, in fact the thin end of the British wedge. We were driven through unattractive streets, dirty and modern (unpardonable combination), to the White Man’s club—Punch, Sphere, tepid whisky, boiling soup, hot apple tart.

  In Rangoon there is a very famous temple-pagoda called the Shwe Dagôn. It rises gold to the sky. Luncheon conversation was about it. To my surprise no one had ever been inside it. “Footwear” was the explanation, “You have to enter barefoot. An Englishman can’t do that. People do everything there.” “Full of lepers,” “the stink of the place”—out rolled the excuses. I said one’s feet were washable, one did much worse with one’s hands, leprosy wasn’t thus caught, a temple vaut bien a whiff. They looked exaggeratedly shocked. I’ve got mixed. It was tea, of course, when this conversation took place, and when it was over we drove in closed cars to have a look round. When we came to the temple door I said “I’m going in.” There was a bit of a scene. Captain Richmond looked revolted and Pilate-ish. Duff shook his cheeks at me, but I am “blind and deaf when I list” and in a flash I had my shoes and stockings off and was following the votaries into the great dark doorway. It was one of the most repaying sights I have ever seen. I was quite breathless with excitement. In this high dark corridor that is always ascending are congregated sleepers, vendors, priests, water-carriers, every caste, every age, every race. Everything sold is beautiful—fantastically-made miniature white pagoda-umbrellas to offer to Buddha, bunches of ginger-flowers, lotus and jasmine, cocks and hens like Chinese ornaments, shining gold Buddhas inset with jewels. On and on you mount, the stairs are very steep, faint with the smell of exotic flowers. Burma girls smoking always their “whacking white cheroot and (actually) wasting Christian kisses on an ’eathen idol’s foot,” their hair agate-smooth, though like the White Queen they carry a comb in it (so handy!). They wear a flower in it too, and a clean muslin shirt (always clean) above their bright, tight sarong. At last you come out on to an open circular court, in the centre of which rises the cloud-high gold-leaf pagoda, surrounded by hundreds of Buddha shrines. The devotees vary from nakedish men who walk round and round, falling whistling-bomb flat between every two steps (progress is slow), and the pretty little maidens, smoking and playing with their babies under Buddha’s nose. Orange and saffron priests lounge around, and little oil-saucers with floating wicks were everywhere being lit. I wished I could have stayed until dark to see the flickering, but Duff and Captain Richmond were weighing a ton on my conscience, so I hurried round. Even without pausing it took me over an hour. When I came out the atmosphere had improved a bit. My excited, radiant expression I think subdued Duff’s irritation, but the Captain still looked nauseated and sulked.

  I liked nothing else of the drive round except the buying of a priest’s umbrella for practical use. It only differs from an ordinary oiled Chinese one in that it has a five-foot-long handle and a pagoda-ish other end. These peculiarities make packing and
even getting into a car more difficult, so it wasn’t a popular buy. It’s Sunday morning, and I can hear an English bell calling the Governor, the Army and the white Raj to church.

  Rangoon

  5 October

  We had a dreadful dinner-party of ten white men and one Burman, the acting Prime Minister, complete in sarong, black buttoned boots, native black jacket, bright pink head-kerchief, white European shirt with gold collar-stud but no collar (de rigueur). My going into the pagoda was talked about with bated horror. It may apparently lose us Burma because, so they say, it is a purely anti-British racket. However, Mr Baxter, Financial Adviser to the Governor, in whose house we had bathed and dressed for dinner, came to my support and said he repeatedly went into the temple and took all English visitors, Peter Fleming included, and that it was now considered the thing to do.

  On the Way to Mandalay by Train

  The stations and the loungers are always a great pleasure to watch, especially after air-travel. The crumbling pagodas everywhere are beautiful. The scene, which varied not at all for six hours, was quite untropical save for man and beast. The rice looked like spring grass, the distant hills might have been our Downs, and the brushland, where no rice grows, looked for all the world like a Sussex upland. Into this English scene are built the romantic, now ruined, bramble-grown shrines to Buddha in century-worn stone and gold-leaf—very ageless and peaceful, made living by browsing white sacrificial oxen.

  More white Raj to meet us at Mandalay and the same hot lunch at the club. In the afternoon we were taken to the undisappointing city sights and to the palace of King Theebaw and Queen Supi-yaw-lat rising mirrored out of water-lilies. The British kicked them out in the Eighties. We were shown over this crumbling relic of splendour by an old Burman, born in the palace in the good old days. He had photographs of his official parents, and of the King and Queen. They were faded out of discernment but he saw them still quite fresh. Most embarrassing it was, being told the story of the royal banishment, the occupation of this fabulous palace of gold and mirror-mosaic, so fairylike and splendid, by the English soldiers who whitewashed the gold to make it lighter, and broke it all up as they do today if given a chance. Even marble is shattered. Nearly all the gold has gone, the glass is unmended, dilapidation reigns. We are barbarians. It would have cost so little and have caused less humiliation if we had respected their Versailles. True the king died well-pensioned in India and all relations draw about one pound and one penny a year. If only Fathers Woodlock and Placid and D’Arcy and the rest of them could be dressed in orange and saffron togas, draped like Pompey’s over a bare shoulder, shave their heads and use against the weather a six-foot-long orange umbrella, you would get some colour into Farm Street and Mells. No one ever told us about priests in Burma, and yet they are the things that overwhelm your eyes. Anyone can be a priest for the nonce. There are 10,000 in Mandalay’s population of 100,000.

  Up the Burma Road, pictured in our mind as dangerously congested with aeroplane-parts, ammunition and oil, we did not pass a lorry. At Maymyo, the summer palace, the Governor received us in a house like a Swiss hotel in the middle of glorious English parkland, lake, forests and glades, race-courses and polo-grounds, golf and botanical gardens, all laid out by a former Governor with Turkish prisoners in 1920.

  Reginald Dorman-Smith was a broadminded man. It was refreshing after Rangoon talks to hear him rail against the little we had done in Burma. Still, my going into the pagoda was too much for him to swallow. He asked the dinner-table of guests and staff if any of them had ever been inside. “You,” he said to a nice young police A.D.C., “you wouldn’t be able to go, Eric, would you, even if you wanted to?” Blushing and bravely Eric answered, “I’m afraid I have been in, sir.”

  Government House, Simla

  10 October

  How they governed India from this mountain-top before motors I can’t imagine, when it took them three days to get up to this huge and hideous Viceregal Lodge, built by Lord Dufferin and greatly tidged up by subsequent Viceroys, I suppose. Our rooms are magnificent—real plumbing, two sitting-rooms and dining-room, no service for me. At my door stood two inscrutables in scarlet, as they did at every door down the passage, but I never got my shoes cleaned. I took them out in despair the following morning and dumb-cramboed brushing them to an old inscrutable, who shook his head at them and gave me to understand that he would fetch help. So he did, but the help gave the dusty shoes the same inscrutable look and would not touch them. Mercifully Captain Somebody appeared when I was half-crying and took the shoes.

  The door of the room where we are assembled before dinner opens and an A.D.C., with the long black regimental coat that I thought was of a past age, and that goes with a black pill-box hat, walks in front of Their Excellencies with the face of a priest before the hangee. The Linlithgows, being mortals of another clay (if mortals they are and not brontosauri), fill the role wonderfully, I think. They have learnt no bad tricks and he has a lot of uninhibited charm, great seriousness, a very serviceable sense of humour and a fund of strange information, not an ounce of smugness. The Roast Beef of Old England is played to make one feel on a liner again, and those two immense creatures stalk in. Twenty servitors in scarlet redingotes with gold hats and daggers clap their two hands to their heads and the meal begins. Once it is finished Duff retires into a huddle with H.E. and I lie luxuriously on a Victorian couch and listened to a first-class orchestra playing such classical music as you would choose to ask for. The assignment for the first time seems to have its recompenses, and later, when Duff came out of his huddle and told me that we were to go off next day to a shooting-camp and that I should be the only woman, I felt it had many rewards.

  Calcutta has been what I liked least, the day shooting with the Viceroy what I liked best. Sleeping in the splendour of the Viceregal tents I enjoyed. I felt as on a stage set for Julius Caesar, or the Field of the Cloth of Gold. I had a huge one lined with printed linens, a large pole up the middle, as big as a circus. Real bed, carpeted floor, lamp-lit and romantic, a full-sized bath made of rubber in a little annexe, also a revolting Indian lu-lu (that has to be cleaned by human hands, “sweepers” belonging to the untouchable caste). I roamed out by my tent’s back-door to try and avoid using this barbarity, but there were too many native policemen guarding the precarious life of the Viceroy for me to find the necessary privacy. I loved too the eleven hundred beaters bawling their lungs out as they tore down the hills hurling rocks in front of them to arouse the game, and their thousand dogs (not retrievers—any dog does).

  I love too the great, great beauty of these huge and tender hills, like a giant Italy sometimes, for there are a lot of trees of the shape and blue of vast olives, and the hills are flowering to their very tops, and water gurgling everywhere. It reminded me all the time of Dante’s Paradiso—whether my idea of it or whether bits of Botticelli drawings or Fra Angelico’s I can’t say—and the distant white figures in single file going up and down the paths wherever you looked, for all the world like the blessed saints and all good souls. I should like to have spent another day and night in those heavenly heights, and I should have liked the Viceroy better still. He has remnants of the child left in his brontosaurian body. He carries for instance a “catty” (catapult) for having a shot at a crow on a roof and he is a butterfly-fan and goes tearing after them with emerald-green net and stinkpot.

  The Governor in Calcutta was Jack Herbert. His wife we were very attached to, so with excitement we accepted to spend two days under their blue-domed summer palace at Darjeeling. Once there I seemed to change my attitude towards India and found everything in those mountains that climb to the Himalayas good, clean and venerable. Kangchenjunga I could see from my bed, highest of his range, taking blood-red shape before the dawn reached the foothills. We were taken to a Tibetan monastery where old monks draped in purple blew from their roof twelve-foot-long trumpets to greet us with a blare. They held a propitiatory service for us—lamas in chrome-yellow with cockatoo-shape
d hats and rows of purple chanting monks.

  I never seemed to get accustomed to the flying. It was the schwer Motiv of all my letters. Hearing that a G.O.C. and his entire staff had been burnt to cinders taking off from Batavia had worsened my panics.

  We got back through the storms and the battering that the most beautiful of tumbling Titans-at-play clouds can give, to Singapore and to the sweet, neat, clean and green house. Japan was being talked of more apprehensively, but I had no nerve left to spasm over war-clouds. Plans for going to Hong Kong and fears of my not being taken preoccupied me. I could, at a pinch, do without seeing Hong Kong, but to reconcile myself to the days of positive pain of anxiety was unbearable. The mission never eventuated; the F.O. vetoed it; for once I blessed Anthony Eden’s wheel-spoking ways. Duff was fully engaged in writing his report, the first part of which was to be flown home as soon as completed. “Counsels of perfection,” he wrote, “must give way to imminence of war,” so the imperfect council was to appoint as soon as possible a Commissioner General for the Far East. If war came a Far Eastern Council would be set up and the Commissioner would automatically become its head. I knew that Duff had in mind Mr Robert Menzies of Australia as being a man of such standing that in conferences he could speak as an equal to Viceroys, Prime Ministers, Commanders-in-Chief, and the President in Washington. I do not think his name was actually suggested in the report, for I remember wondering and I wrote to Conrad:

  What if it is approved of? And what if Duff is given the office? What if we stay here for the duration? It doesn’t bear thinking of. Maybe Winston thinks Duff comfortably out of the way here—no necessity to find him another job that way and quite easy to stop any trouble—some act of initiative by coded cable. Soon our fate will be in the balance at 10 Downing Street. My ideal would be an order to “stay put until the right man for the job is found, probably in March, then return.” I would then holiday with John Julius at Easter, come home to an English spring, a farm programme and my own dear farmer.