by Diana Cooper
So Tony Keswick took home the report, nothing loath, for he was to rejoin the family that he had long been parted from. I was dreadfully sad to see him go. He had become an essential to our happiness and good humour. Besides, he carried perhaps our fate in his hands. We settled down for a short spell during which the Hong Kong visit collapsed, and plans were made for an expedition to Australia and New Zealand. War began to cloud the air. Vincent Sheean and Edgar Mowrer arrived—vultures assembling, but vultures I was devoted to. Ramadan came and went. I went to see Hamlet in a traditional Chinese production. I had daily lessons from a Malay guru, a gummy, giggling little man in a Mahommedan hat, who taught me the House that Jack Built in his language. The repetition is exceedingly helpful and to be recommended for first steps in any language. One could also learn “Twelve for the twelve Apostles” with advantage. I learnt too that hair is grass, a train is a firecart and an express a proud firecart, that a holiday is “eating wind” and ice “iron water.” This is all I have retained. There were work-parties at Government House to which I went, and cut out pyjamas and talked about war. “There are no shelters at all; they would never work, they say; you come to water as soon as you dig.” Fighter-planes of a very obsolete make were depended upon to protect the island. No gas-masks were issued; “the Chinese would never look after them.” The Sultan of Johore gave me a mynah bird, a loquacious talker, but only in Japanese. Duff let it escape. There were Chinese festivals to revel in, dragons and bulls made of Chinamen in pelts and scales. In the temples one could see marzipan tortoises for sale and, most surprising of all, the veritable Madame Tussaud peep-show opium-smokers—half-naked beggars supine beneath a flickering red light. I was told by a Javanese masseur that the temples gave free opium to consumptives. It proved an effective cure, as de Quincey discovered. Martin Russell was my companion for these revels while Duff pored over his report.
Before leaving for Australia I heard good news from John Julius, now at school in Canada, and all the home news from Conrad:
Ploughing is a very great new pleasure in my life. Almost everything is nice—the walking so slowly, smell of earth, solitude, communion with the horses, talking their odd language and so on. The mice are the sad part. You plough them out of their well-prepared subterranean nests and they skip away terrified and in great danger of being trodden on. Today a mother stopped in the road and took a small child out of a perambulator and held it up well above a wall for it to see me ploughing. The child was far too young to speak, but it seemed deeply interested.
Mr Rendall and Mr Pipkin came for the threshing. Mr Pipkin (72 or 73) never removed his bowler or starched collar all day and worked like a horse. He is hardly as tall as John Julius and has the shortest legs in the world. When I paid him I said “What do you say to 8/- a day?” and they both said “We come only to oblige you and don’t mind at all what we are paid.” It was a noble answer.
We had a quiet guard, not a mouse stirring. Lady Lovat appeared and gave me nearly the whole of a red deer from Caithness. He must have been the Monarch of the Glen by Sir Edwin Landseer. There was a huge haunch, two flanks of ribs and the umbles, from which, as you know, umble pie is made for inferiors. It was an embarrassing gift and I’m not exactly wrapt up in venison. I’d rather eat sardines, cheese or two fried eggs.
I have started a new book The Heathen are Wrong and the author is called Bagger, but I have not let it deter me.
Ronald Knox comes daily to work on the farm and is a real help. The men now call him “the old Rector.” They think of him as seventy. He is in fact ten years younger than me, perhaps Duff’s contemporary.
After two days of packing and prayers we left at dawn in a crowded Dutch aeroplane bound for Australia. Our first night was to be spent at Bali in the hostel of Manx, a Liverpudlian lady who ran it as a rival to the K.L.M. hotel. She had been warned that we were anxious to see the dancing, so all was prepared and the thought was like a lifebuoy to me.
Sky
At four we got to the earthly paradise, Bali, and there was no disappointment—old girl Manx, fifty, four foot high, a mop of black hair and a “Mother Hubbard” garment, was to pop us into cars and take us to her establishment. Already the men hauling off the luggage from the aeroplane had looked different from any natives I had seen. A translucent coffee-coloured torso, sleek and strong, a sarong coloured and draped by Tiepolo, and an innocent beauty of countenance. Arrived at Manx’s “Kampong” the servants greeted us into this jungle, almost garden, on the beach, four or five of them and as many children of different sizes, all dressed as princes and princesses in macaw colours with flowers used as jewels in ears and hair. They clasp their hands as in prayer when speaking to you and all move like the waves of the sea, for they are all highly trained dancers of a dance that is well beyond the powers of a European. In the jungle garden there were three or four little grass houses with a fresh cool native bath apiece, a grass bar and a terrace to eat on overlooking the sea. Nothing lovelier could there be. Manx took us a drive through the town and villages. The women are naked to the waist, not of course all Milos but all with the serene face. From what? No education? No driving force? No pathetic content nor yet divine discontent? They are Hindus up to a point and have dilapidated and beautiful little temples here and there, rather ungarnished and very ungarish. Dinner of roast sucking-pig and flowers, I think, and a native heady drink was improved by an attractive and beautiful young couple—Dutch but seemed Russian, and artists both. Pol was the name.
After dinner the dancing. That I couldn’t describe if I wanted to—the beauty, the strangeness, the fantastic music made of sound only, not tune or time but seemingly all the better for that. The audience—all the island with their children and their shops brought along for the festa, incredibly artistic and sophisticated and distinguished, distinguished. (Emphasis is given in Malay by a simple repetition of the operative word—very useful!) Nothing seen ravished me more in the realms of travel, customs and art in dancing, than these Balinese rites. It ended, as it had to, and we went to our jungly grass house, only to leave it at dawn and board our Dutch “Dodo.”
We flew to Darwin, where flowering trees outshine Malaya’s. It was jammed with troops, so not until the next day, when we travelled nearly 3000 miles to Sydney, did the emptiness of the continent astound one—an arid plain, rarely a habitation, no tree or river or one town. Why I wondered were there no human beings? Why had Australia not followed America’s repaying example of accepting settlers of all nations—Jews, Poles, Austrians, Russians? All for a white Australia? A terror of unemployment? So there is no one to work or buy or make employment. All this was thought nearly twenty years ago. Today the case is, I suppose, altered. We landed at 8.30 p.m. in darkness amid the million lights of Sydney. Thousands of cruel cameras and flashlights to blind me, already deaf from the long flight. I felt inhuman. A sea of blue and green electrically contorted faces, an address from the Prime Minister, dissecting pressmen. I might have been a one-celled amoeba for all the sense I made. One night of rest at Government House and on again to the country capital of Canberra. [It may no longer be rural, but twenty years ago it was built only in mind’s eyes.] We stayed at Government House.
It’s really rather lovely, and the Governor General, Lord Gowrie (once Sandy Ruthven, V.C.), and Lady Gowrie are unspoilt pets. The unpopulated country is beautiful and invigorating. Looking out of my window now I might be in a tender part of Scotland—no moors, Mary Rose country with blue burns and blue distant hills, yellow foreground and never a fence nor a house, bigger and better roses at every step. Miles away, equally isolated in Scotch beauty, is the House of Parliament. Miles away again a bit of residential section, I suppose. A hill is pointed out where Embassies are to be built, another, miles away, where the Foreign Office is to stand. It’s fascinating to see an unbuilt town, more fun than Pompeii. The English flowers are enough to make one cry—huge iris, sweet peas, gladioli, roses, lilies, catmint—all the garden let into the rooms and smelling of
June. No Viceregal pomp at all. I suppose that to the Australians it would be a joke. The half was not told me about the Gowries. I eavesdropped on a conversation at dinner between her and Duff. She was saying that, when the war was over, she was going to keep pigs because she was so fond of them. Lord Gowrie next me across the table said, “What’s that, dear?” “Only telling Mr Cooper about the pigs.” “Horrible brutes!” She: “Then Sandy will keep violets.” Duff: “What will he do with them?” “O, pick them and tie them into bunches.” Then I had to turn back to Mr Evatt, Minister of External Affairs.
I’m lying at Melbourne as I close this letter. Then back to Sydney. The Wakehursts make it happy for us there. They are what I once heard some horror call “very us-ish.” I want to get back from Melbourne’s greyness to the dazzle of the Sydney sea and the new-found jacaranda trees, oleanders and coral trees. Letters are life, don’t forget it and don’t flag.
I really loved Australia. I thought it most beautiful. Its green downs, its soothing flocks of peace. The eucalyptus trees had almost flesh-coloured limbs and their movements in growth had a human sweep. While Duff visited Ministers and airfields and munition-factories I would take an occasional drive with Lord Gowrie into the country, stopping to talk to farmers coming from several hundred miles away with slow-moving sheep. We would look for and never see the duck-billed platypus, nor, alas, the lyre-bird, but the kangaroos, wallabies, koala bears and emus were fun and usually unexpectedly tame. The Australians were good to us and we loved each other. I should like to revisit Australia.
In New Zealand we landed at Auckland. We got lost in the sky on our way to the South Island. We were like souls in a grey limbo and the petrol was beginning to fail when God put us again into radio communication and we came to Christ-church. My mind must have been overweighted with new scenes and impressions, for I remember little but the fine mountainous country and the burning patriotism of the New Zealanders, the Ireland green, the fleecy sheep, the imported gorse and starlings and elder-trees which have turned to plagues, geysers, and Maoris who sang like Slavs, the charm of Wellington, and prefab houses with corrugated-iron roofs and enough wires, poles, cisterns and waterwheels to make it look like the Klondyke in ’96.
I shall never let the beauty of Australia fade from my vision. I missed only the touching and safe cluster of farm, manor and cottages round an aspiring church protecting its dead beneath the crooked tombstones, to be seen, I suppose, from Siberia to Californian mission-towns. Back to Sydney for goodbyes and Godspeeds and “happy landings,” and up and off again for five flying-days, coming down at Gladstone and Townsville, where we slept to the uproarious noise of drunken sailors and woke to the screech of what sounded like drunken birds with Australian accents. On to Karamba and back to Darwin, to be welcomed by the Residents, Mr and Mrs Abbott, to whom we had become very attached. The heat was suffocating and the mosquitoes as dense as locust-storms. All night they bit and I was sure that the irritation would lead to something more dire. On to Timor, Koepang and Komodo, the country of dragons, over the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Arafura Sea, still like the earth before she received her name. Savu and the Sandalwood Seas already a later day of world-creation, land and sea slimily blended with islands backed like whales, lagoons for sea-serpents, simple blue and sand-coloured. Pterodactyls flying with us would not have surprised. Then Bima, civilised but for flies, Bali-like though not so innocent and old, Surabaya, and at last Batavia. Java looked watered and tended and tilled and fought-for after Australia, that wasted Utopia.
Singapore
2 December
Just now I went to the Naval Base to see Prince of Wales and Repulse come in and five other pieces, camouflaged to kill, a lovely sight but on the petty side. I watched them glide in. Everyone very moved and over-excited.
3 December
Just been to a dinner given by our brave new Defence Tuan Tom (my name for Tom Phillips) and Captain Tennant. Tuan is four-foot-nothing and sharp as forked lightning. I put great faith in him. Brussels ball once again. We danced on the wide decks and quaffed toasts for victory, the red-and-white awnings flapless and everyone dressed overall and grinning with security. Tide turned, wind changed, and beneath my red-and-white dress my heart tolled.
7 December
Peladang (farmer, in Malay) darling, since writing those two words in ink I have been struck down with dengue fever. It has a sort of Kipling–Maugham–Conrad cachet but it’s rather unpleasant. Like mild rheumatic fever with no aftermath. We are expecting the balloon to go up any time now.
8 December
Martin woke us at 3 a.m. to say that the Japanese had made a landing in the far north of Malaya. He drew Priam’s curtains in the dead of night. I took it more calmly than a Trojan. We both turned over and slept until woken an hour later by the familiar thunder of aeroplanes, guns and bombs, followed at long last by jokey sirens whistling away unintermittently for half an hour in different quarters of the town. To my great surprise I felt nothing. Was this unusual calm due to the dengue-drugs or to an attitude I had settled to adopt when the bombing started—the veteran’s “O well, after London, you know”—having become part of me? That first raid they dropped a bomb bang in the middle of Raffles Square, a bull’s-eye.
I felt, when I first saw this pretty feminine rococo town, so graceful and flimsy with its frail pink and robin’s-egg-blue arcades and quays garlanded with nameless fruit and flowers and paper intricacies, that a modern world would not let it survive. Either friendly ferro-concrete or barbarian hands would get at it, so it’s for the rubble-heap.
It’s only 9 a.m. and we’ve talked to the Governor and the Sultan, a rich start. Three or four ships have been sighted, thought at first to be cruisers but now turn out to be transports. Shouldn’t we have bombed or sunk them before they could land? The stop press says that Honolulu and Havana have been bombed. Is it possible? Aircraft-carriers? Or have they captured Wake and Midway? Well, America is at war, but will she be at war with Germany too and throw her glove in their snout?
Now I suppose we must expect gas and parachutists, dropping of soldiers dressed as orange priests, with their umbrellas turned to parachutes, and the rest of it. I’ve not been in an invaded country before. There will be naval bombardment too. Lord help us! The air is loud with aircraft, ours I hope.
10 December
This morning the telegram arrives that Duff has the job of Minister for Far Eastern Affairs with much authority, enough to be able to form a War Council. My darling Duff is tickled to death. Either this answer or one to the effect that Menzies was on his way (“Carry on pending handing over, then return”) he was ready to be pleased with. The dread was of “Still considering report. Suggest you roll bandages till we say stop.” The present development flatters and stimulates him. What does it do to me? I’m curiously numb, thank God. I can see every horror—no escape, speedy and complete infiltration by Japs, Rotterdamming of Singapore town and the Base, massacre of the whites—but all in a detached, weary way. People who have been in Chungking are windier than I am. I always knew Chungking wasn’t a patch on London or Bognor, caverns measureless to man and two hours’ warning!
11 December
When I said that I thought of every horror, I didn’t think of our two proud ships finding so early a grave. Duff came in from the Naval Base at 8.30 and used that dreadful line (first used to me by Helen Kirkpatrick when Boulogne fell) “How black can you take it?” Expecting black, it was blacker. We get no details. Did Tuan Tom, in whom I had faith, go down? O toll for Tuan Tom, poor little live wire! I should hate to be killed by Japs and I probably shall be. The Germans are legions of Anti-Christ, but missing links. No, no, not sunk by missing links. Our peninsula is yellow as gorse with them, but no one seems much put about.
A very entertaining man called Darvall came to dinner and we talked about what muddlers we were. Duff had to go off and do a broadcast on the loss of the ships, and I hung over the table, lit by two candles (all we dare show), while the
fever dropped off my face and arms on to the cloth. This morning at last I’m normal. Last night I was 101. I feel like something rightly thrown away. It’s difficult to remember myself as that bright dynamo in Australia so few weeks ago. I’ll brighten. A nice cable from Claire Luce today advising courage in the shooting-match, an invigorating one from Tommy Stout Winston dragged me out of my well for a moment. “Who put her in?” Sigh for poor Pussy.
I learnt coding and decoding yesterday in the office. It’s what I should like best to do if there is a lot of work, but I fear there won’t be and I shall have to nurse if the raids are bad.
O little did my mither wist
The night she cradled me
The lands I was to travel in
Or the death I was to dee.
12 December
If only Duff had received his orders three days earlier, the War Council, however hastily formed, would never have allowed the ships their umbrella-less enterprise. The Council meets daily and our dear Admiral Layton has been dragged off his home-bound ship to fill his old post.