by Diana Cooper
16 January
Never a dull minute. We arrived at the penal settlement of Port Blair, Andaman Islands, at about three. I took a hasty dislike to it. No gentle Malays and intelligent Chinese, only surly filthy Indians and bad Burmen, criminals to a man though freed, and with their crimes written large on their faces. Another airliner came in from Rangoon and the west and disgorged three Australian officers. There seemed little plan and no action. At last we piled into two small motor-craft and spluttered off through high seas to Ross Island, some thirty minutes away. Ross is the select patch where the Chief Commissioner has a Residency. There is a barracks, a post office, a club, a church and parsonage, a village institute, and that’s about all, except for an old Circuit Home lately turned into a rest-house for air-travellers. On the quay of this little settlement, now evacuated on account of the war, stood the strangest old rickshaw-for-two ever I saw, equivalent to the Irish bankrupt’s buggy. It had six slutty-looking Indian jailbirds, with filthy torn white shorts and different shades of faded carmine tops and turbans, to draw it up a stiffish but very short hill. A quiet, unassuming gentleman in shabby European tropical get-up said “My name is Waterfall. Do get into the buggy. I’ll walk beside you. I thought it better to lodge you in my house. I’m not living there myself. I’m afraid the light is cut off and we’ll see if we can’t forage up some tea. I’m afraid we have no kitchen. I thought we’d dine on the other island with the Colonel and Captain.” The house was indescribable, very large and wandery and shapeless, with strange devil-carvings mixed with suburban taste. A huge haunted bedroom (“no mosquitoes on Ross,” so un-netted beds), the inevitable plumbing horrors of India and an impossible trickle from a cold tap dripping into a pan-bath. We messed around and suggested looking at the flowerless garden, clinging to our hats and skirts that the wind was skittish with, while time would not pass. Dinner, he said, was on the other side at 8.30. One couldn’t wash, one couldn’t even go to the lu for very shame. I suggested dining at eight and we listened to a croaking portable wireless. I’m only interested in Singapore, and there was no news of it. We crossed over by launch. Daylight was fading. We listened to the radio again in the Colonel’s melancholy house, and a brilliant suggestion was made that we should move to the Club and hear the radio there. This was welcomed as a time-killer, so we buggied over, the Chief Commissioner going as always by foot, and listened for the third time to the meatless programme of news. Still there was whisky at the Club and some boys and even a woman not yet evacuated. There are only three left.
Then back to the Colonel’s house and dinner and port, and a snub from the Chief Commissioner when I said that India was an unhappy country, and he said that I hadn’t seen it and was talking about things I didn’t know anything about. He was right, of course, but I was only describing my impression. That got the Colonel and the Captain winking and on my side, and cheered things up a little. The excuse of being woken at 5 a.m. allowed us to beat a difficult retreat across a troubled sea in a bit of a launch at about 9.30. The Chief Commissioner waved us off with relief, and we groped our way up in inky darkness to our inky house, empty but for ourselves, two witch’s cats and three speechless Indian delinquents. After a struggle with washing and a stinking lamp we slept, but I was as usual eaten mercilessly by mosquitoes, no protection, no net, no artillery of Flit. I chucked it at four and somehow lit and tended the lamp.
At 5.30, when I was dressed and packed, the three Indians padded into the room patting their stomachs and saying a lot. No means of understanding. I knew it couldn’t mean breakfast and there was a tone of alarm. Duff slept, cheek on folded hands, through this babel. At last the word Circuit Home emerged from the gibberish, so seizing my torch I ran down to the Circuit Home, to find that our pilot was at death’s door, 104 temperature, swollen painful glands in the groins. The rough, tough, jolly lady-doctor Thornton who had joined our flying-boat at Batavia was well in charge and diagnosed it as something I had never heard of belonging to the malarial school. It was a body-blow. Praying that Duff would have got a move-on and be shaving, but unable to explain my absence, I went with the eastbound (already-late) Australians in the launch to their Clipper, and got all the low-down about our near future. News wasn’t too bad. The First Officer of the eastbound aeroplane, in dual control with our First Officer, would pilot our ship, and a kind passenger R.A.F. boy would First-Officer the eastbound machine. Well, that’s better than another day in prison, though two underlings at the joy-sticks is not my ideal. I got home at eight and found the Circuit Home people having a gorgeous sausage-and-egg breakfast after a lovely night in fresh rooms with netted beds. The Chief Commissioner, from long dealings with the punishable, must have thought up something to irk us, i.e. almost solitary confinement in the dark with three murderer-keepers and no breakfast.
A half-caste doctor, delighted to get a line from Dr Thornton, proclaimed the Captain’s disease to be the same as had the first diagnoser, so he is to be got on the aeroplane somehow and left in a Calcutta hospital. A wonderful procession formed itself of passengers, coolies and luggage. The lady doctor, quite a lot grimier and gayer than yesterday, me with my nightcap on to keep the hair from the hurricane, and in the middle the septic pink-coated bearers carrying shoulder-high the Captain on his bed. His mattress laid on the floor of the launch, he was tossed across the bay and somehow squeezed through the narrow aperture into the aeroplane. The lowest Officer and I dragged and unscrewed and pulled at the chairs and tables in the smallest compartment until we wrenched them free, and he lies there now, a sort of dying Nelson in the hold. Devoted officers fan him and I mop him with eau de Cologne, for the heat is intense when we are at sea-level. The shocking truth is that I’m frightened of infection, more for Duff than for myself, and I dare not say so. How lucky are those who don’t think of every fatal eventuality.
4 p.m.
Just refuelled at Rangoon. My old Shwe Dagôn was gleaming unscathed. We made a lovely landing on the Irrawaddy. Youth at the helm, and at the prow as well, has kept me a little jumpy, and now we are over that nasty mountainous bit that divides us from the Bay of Bengal. We shan’t get to Calcutta, but will spend the night at my dear little friendly Akyab, the rice-port on the coast. It has a good hospital and we can leave our perhaps dying Captain there. Thalassa! Thalassa! I feel better over water.
I must have been writing during all the flying hours. It helped me in the air to keep my small mind contained in earthly human limits, not lost in vertiginous space and elements unknown. If it was not the Irrawaddy, it was the Hooghly or the Ganges, and bemused through Gwalior and other bird’s-eyed landmarks we came to Delhi unexpectedly by train.
Impressions of grandeur. Secretaries in Prussian coats, palms on the platform, Lancers by the portals of the thick red walls, no cheer or hallos, or “Have a drink, you must be cold.” No, but smuggled discreetly in (with as much haste as is decent) to our suite—the Viceroy’s (discarded as untenable) two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two sitting-rooms and three large loggias, rather ugly and intensely cold, walls curry-coloured, plumbing, lighting and roses good, service nil. A ghastly ruffian in tattered European jacket, cotton English shirt (tail out, of course) and filthy socks out at toes, a clout for a turban, is introduced as our bearer. No rudimentary knowledge of his job. Breakfast is served by four turbaned giants in scarlet redingotes beneath which peep white petticoats. Life in the Viceroy’s house is not like hotel or ship. We register our meals in or out with noughts and crosses. You might see no one all day but the A.D.C. assigned to you, who is daily changed. The aeroplane is postponed every twenty-four hours, and time drags although there are wonders of Mogul art to be visited. The air is brilliant and clear wie am ersten Tag. Old Delhi is indescribably squalid with half-hidden remains of beauty, a marble doorway, a delicate grill. The Viceroy’s house is too big, too big for nature and its trees, too big for its height, too sprawled, too big for anything and full of faults and mischief, full of great conceptions and magnificence. Even rainbows can
be laid on, Lutyens had told me, while building. We see none. The A.D.C. marches us a mile to the morning-room. There we stand, lonely V.I.P.’s whispering complaints till the Vicereine (for the Viceroy is sickly, abed) sweeps in smiling resignedly, led by another A.D.C. and two gentlemen flunkeys. These lead the three of us to an ante-dining-room where the canaille, i.e. staff and guests, join the melancholy procession. Lo! before each chair the scarlet-clothed Indian buries his face in his dark hands to hide his untutored mind as we sit at our assigned places. Luncheon scarce swallowed before we double back to our rooms and thumb-twiddle until four, when the A.D.C. is again at his unrewarding task of taking us sightseeing. Forts, mosques, palaces seven, Delhi’s towers and tanks, follies and shrines. The Taj, under scaffolding as usual, the Great Mogul, marble inlaid by Italian hands, colour and gold, transparent alabaster, gardens with even balance of earth and water. Home at six for thumb-twiddling until eight, when processions re-form. The broadcast of alarm and despondency fills the gap between table and the double back to one’s room.
Everything is clouded because the man I love and admire has influenza, or does he not want to see us? His never being referred to is suspicious. This house is so vast that birth, death and marriage are doubtless going on within its walls without our knowledge. I see a pack of foxhounds coming out of a porte-de-maître outside my window. In our passage for two days we are asphyxiated by the smell of elephant. It may be a dead one in our wing somewhere; it may be dead Viceroy. The party are all Jim Crows, I think, for the Duke of Connaught, so I tear out and buy an unbecoming grey number to merge in with the weeds which may be for Lord Linlithgow.
Later
So the Viceroy is not dead, for he appears, not in glory but looking weary and ill. The next day we are at last off again. Hours and hours over that dry hag Mother India’s hot plains and cold skies.
On, on to the Persian Gulf that stays in my eyes when other scenes of this Odyssey have faded—a sort of Sinai freemason picture, half-seen at Salt Lake City, cathedral-shaped rocks long-shadowed by a rising sun, a great eye with compasses framing the vision. Is it trucial Arabia? No question answered in the air, a thousand ages in Thy sight. Six becomes three in a trice, and it’s Basra, and nothing to say about Basra but a bed and at misty dawn on again to Bagdad—only the tarmac of Bagdad—and down again at Habbaniya, where Oliver Lyttelton, Minister of State in Egypt, is to chinwag with Duff.
“Dr Livingstone, I presume?” said Duff when he met us, only they were both like snowmen, white with cold and the silly chilled yet blazing sun not unfreezing them. Oliver bouncing and lusty as ever, his pretty wife pinched and frail.
“Shall we be back for Valentine’s Day?”
Conrad must put on his thinking cap about my farm activities. He must pray Bashan and Isis and all the Hindus that Princess Cow will be functioning, and pray Baal too for the calf. Shall I have a sow this time that says “honk”? We must requisition more arable and order fertilisers. Think, farmer, think!
Next stop Tiberias. We eat a nauseating meal in a lido and I discover (unfortunately long afterwards) that the waters beneath are those that Christ walked on—the Sea of Galilee. Over Jaffa, where they are throwing oranges and lemons into the sea, over Tel Aviv, over the Suez ditch (it’s nothing more) to alight like an ibis on the Nile. Here we instal ourselves with hospitable Sir Miles and Lady Lampson, but they don’t realise, poor things, for how long.
A load of trouble meets us. The Catalina flying-boat is due to leave next night for Malta, Gibraltar, Lisbon and Foynes. We buy extra wool sweaters, stockings and shawls and are all set when the sudden cry goes up “No women on Service planes.” Duff fumes and Oliver Lyttelton, who has returned to his Cairo base on account of Egyptian crises, refuses to overrule the Priority Board, which he has the power to do, and ship me in place of mailbags. It is senseless to send me priority all round the world and impede me on the home run. Oliver is afraid of questions in the House and suggests a flying-boat being sent from England to Lagos to fetch us, and so home via Brazil and Baltimore. That extravagance should raise a louder question. “Send Lady Diana and the luggage by sea,” I say in a voice that echoes suicide. They won’t even use the inflexible-rule line, but indulge in so-called comforting reasons, “No accommodation for ladies,” “War risks.” What about London Town and the Atlantic? Brendan Bracken is wired to by Duff asking him to expedite our flight out of Egypt. It is all disquieting, so are Eastern wars. This one is none too good and the Pacific one appalling. In the night we get news of the retreat into Singapore island. I can’t think of anything else—Martin there, our Robbie fighting the last rearguard action, Alex Newboult, so gentle and so brave, my amah and the Chinese boys, all those good peaceful harmonious people in the delicate plaster house, bashed and crushed, crumbled and scrapped. Bernard Freyberg says that Singapore is a “goner.” “Once you get the fighters over your airfields it’s over,” he says. We had them over ours—does he remember?
No news of departure. The Lampsons will refer to us in future as the Outstayers. Fortunately Sir Miles is oblivious of our nuisance, as he has a first-rate political crisis boiling up on him.
There have been students in the street shouting “Vive Rommel” and “À bas l’Angleterre” and “Vive le Roi.” These presumably are the Fascist palace-pro-Italian party, I gather a very small one. The King wouldn’t see the leader of the Wafd until the Palace was surrounded with tanks and machine-guns, and a boat waiting to bear him, crownless, to Ceylon. Sir Miles went with some generals and a pistol for Pharaoh’s head to insist on our advice being taken. In the other hand he carried an abdication drafted by the practised hand of Walter Monckton. Pen in hand the victim complained of the ink and then asked for another chance, so the tanks rolled home. When I came back from dining with my new favourite, Mr Alexander Kirk, American Minister here, a dear freak, at 11 p.m. I found the Embassy hall a babel of huddled groups—Oliver and Moira Lyttelton, Walter Monckton, Mr Michael Wright, lots of A.D.C.’s, Military Secretaries and unknowns. Wright and Walter see it reminiscent of Munich in not getting an abdication signed, but Oliver and H.E. were “just certain” they had been right in the present arrangement. H.E. came out of his den, dressed in a pearl-grey frac, arm-in-arm with Nahas Pasha, both grinning themselves in two. Nahas (now Prime Minister) was waiting outside for orders.
The original plan was for a coup d’état at seven. If the King proved stubborn the raid Alert was to be sounded and the palace surrounded. This hour synchronised with a “few words” about the harmony of our two countries being delivered by Duff at the Anglo-Egyptian Club, where we were bidden as honoured guests. Our orders were to make for home should the siren go. I disliked the humiliation of us London veterans rushing for safety at the first alert. The clock struck seven and no wailing, so we thought all was settled. Really they had discovered that sounding the siren called all the soldiers in the vicinity to the palace, which was not a situation to suit the British plan, so the coup was postponed until nine. When the poor cowed Pharaoh slumped and agreed to send for Nahas and suited his action to the word, the zeal of the surrounding armoured divisions did not allow of the Pasha’s entrance. It all sounds a bit comic-opera, but maybe will read in history as comparable to Brumaire 1799.
The Priority Board, after two weeks, has seen the light. Friday was, as usual, finally selected as departure-day, and we went down to the dock at 9 p.m. in fine fettle. I had had my whack at dinner and a final mouthful of brandy, and three turquoise amytols. I felt like a million dollars, hot as toast and V.C.-worthy. The Ambassador and Lady saw us into the ordinary flying-boat, the bad ship Claire. No stories true, no lying on bomb-racks with mail on your stomach, but the luxurious dentist-chair and to our surprise masses of inferior tough passengers instead of ourselves alone. We settled down. The lights were put out, or maybe fused, and I composed myself for a nice drugged sleep. An hour later I was rudely awoken and told to disembark as the trip was OFF. No reason given. It was like being roused in the middle of on
e’s operation and being told to walk back to bed. We felt pretty aggrieved too. Bad. But wait until you hear this one. After a night at the Embassy, with new sheets and apartments furbished up in the small hours, after an interminable day, we re-embarked in the Claire, same time, same drug-and-drink precautions. An Air Marshal to see us off. Everything honky-donk, we actually took off about 9.15, made it, and were airborne and relieved. I composed myself to sleep and was lost in a semi-calm when, at midnight, I woke to a certain unrest, a lot of vibration and a soothing Scots steward telling us, with what serenity he could, that we must get our life-jackets on immediately. He then walked up the emergency ladder, loosened all bolts of the trap-door above and took up his anti-panic position at the ladder’s foot. It is difficult for me to believe that I was entirely unfrightened. Was this unpredictable detachment due to amytol? Or is one like that in the hour of death? Duff thought that things looked desperate, and with reason. He told me afterwards that he recited to himself “Be absolute for death; either death or life shall thereby be the sweeter.” He had learnt the Measure for Measure lines in the trenches and used them for such emergencies. I prayed a bit but in no great fear. I even put what trinkets and little valuables I had into my pockets for salvage. I don’t know what the eight other passengers were doing because I was in the front seat and strapped in, and the chairbacks being high, I couldn’t look backwards. The lifebelt is your seat and the back-padding of your seat, so one sat hard-arse from then on. After a little time a member of the crew appeared and said the situation had improved and that we had turned and hoped to land at Aboukir or Alexandria. Later another bulletin told us that, with luck, we should get back to Cairo, which indeed we did at 3 a.m., none the worse and no better off. The Lampsons had gone away to their desert home, so we had the dreary Embassy to ourselves. Clean sheets again.