Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  We made our usual start on the 13th. The same formula, good-bye chorus, drinks, drugs, layers of wool and fur piled upon us. This time we only got as I thought about half-way to Malta when the soothing steward told us we were landing in five minutes. “How is it possible?” I said. “We are not due for two hours.” “But we’re landing at Cairo,” he answered serenely, with no reason to follow. Only next day, for the third time in our bedroom at Government House reappointed with clean linen and flowers, did we learn that another aircraft was encumbering the hush-hush harbour of Malta.

  On St Valentine’s Day

  We actually got away, nerves a-quiver. We reached Malta about five but circled around until seven. I was peeping through the black-out and seeing a bit of gunfire, but so great is my air-alarm still that gunfire doesn’t seem to matter much. Malta looked as before, too beautiful. There was a non-stop raid all day. The people in the street seem completely disinterested and at the Palace you seek the roof whenever the gunfire sounds more than usually active. It is cruelly cold on the roof and you see nothing, but it is the custom. We arrived, perished with cold, to be told that there are no hot baths, and indeed as they have neither coal nor timber it is not surprising. I crouched over an electric heater and appeared for lunch. Grace, before so-called meals, and T.T. house-rules. The Governor Dobbie has the faith and heart of a saint and allows only rations on which no native can survive. Weevil-biscuits and spam is the fare offered the high, though below stairs, said a visiting chauffeur, “I had a whole duck to meself.” Our greatest fear was to be held up in this worthy man’s noble palace. God was good and sent us a flying-boat on the same evening. So good were the conditions that we by-passed Gibraltar. I saw its tall searchlight-fingers pointing from the black block of rock, isolated in Spanish flood-lighting, and at seven we landed at Lisbon. We were told that we could catch the old Dodo you saw us off on at seven that same morning and I’m writing on it now. “Nobly, nobly” probably beneath me as I write. It is the last page of my block, and with God’s good grace we should be home at 2 p.m. I’m much moved. How soon shall I see you?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Back to the Land

  LONDON seemed quiet, almost humdrum, after our alarums and lashing excursions. Morale seemed soaring in spite of the gruesome catastrophes that were piling up in the Far East and Africa. Conrad, older and tireder but unchanged in outlook and courage, was still my strength and my weakness.

  There followed an interim, a time of indecision in ourselves and in our future. The Sussex land tugged hard at my inclinations—to return to farm-smells, routine, livestock dramas, to the idyll of last year’s merry peasant life. I found, through some organisation that told you where a rush was on and when inexpert hands were needed, some work to tide me over the coming hang-fire weeks. The making of camouflage-nets seemed to have no appeal for war-hands, with its 1s. 6d. an hour and no music while you worked. This curious and useful task had dumped itself on the top floor of the Army & Navy Stores, so there I clocked in for the full working day. There were erected large open frames of wood like Gobelins tapestry equipment, on which tarred nets were stretched. To each frame were allocated two women, face to face through the trellis, both supplied with foliage-coloured strips of canvas. We would thread and knot them in roughly symmetrical patterns. I began as a time-worker opposite a calm middle-aged lady who, as the long hours ticked peacefully away, told me much of her past life and her aspirations. Older than me, she was far nobler. As war-effort she had resolved to learn Esperanto and hieroglyphs that, thus armed, she might be ready to follow the invading armies across the sea into countries where, not knowing their vulgar tongues, she could still be useful. The rest of us were a bit cretinous, dregs in fact, without zest or much morale.

  Efficiency at the hand-destroying job was quickly learnt and I put myself on to piece-work. With no union this was allowed, and oh, the difference in production! The three or four of us on piece-work brought our sandwiches and pots of yoghourt and ate our snacks gaily enough on a bank of bogus woodland. Half our time was spent dodging bottle-necks, pursuing nets and strips that held us up by not appearing when they were wanted. We naturally turned out twice as many “camouflages” as did lethargic “timers” who gave most of the day to queueing up for cups of tea or the lavatory, and to snatching ten-minute breaks for a fag on the balcony, generally falling into a watch and thence into a weakness.

  I can’t remember how many weeks I threaded the sylvan green and the numberless shadows into a web to make pastoral protection for young gunners; not long, for by spring Duff, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with little or nothing to do, was again commuting to Bognor and writing his book on King David, while I was back with the dung and the swill, the curds and whey, and the spiders. The goats roved and the sky was empty, so I re-stocked with seven dreadful little castrated nose-ringed pigs, as miserable as Alice’s in Wonderland, with Sir Francis the drake, geese tame as dogs, making messes in my lap and wandering upstairs, downstairs, to and from the chamber. I also added a vast colony of rabbits. These were our meat, made succulent with pungent herbs, while their pelts, alumed and then nailed on to boards like flayed martyrs’ skins, dried in the salty sun and made gloves for airmen. It was now that Enid Bagnold Jones, the torch of Rottingdean, came closely into my life and ardent affection. She too was a smallholder and most Wednesdays we two old farm-wives would meet at Barnham market (by train to save our meagre petrol-ration), baskets of produce on our arms, our shoulders hung with nets and sacks, first quivering with living things to be auctioned, then carried back filled with kids and cheeping day-old ducks, often out of control, flustering free on to the platform—a rough-and-tumble harum-scarum Rowlandson-Caldecott scene of flying feathers, ourselves doubled with laughter at our obstreperous merchandise. But the day I took my calf to sell there was no laughter—Oscar, my Guernsey, just three weeks old, proud-stepping as a prince and fearless of his butchers.

  Our green lawns were littered with mobile wire enclosures in which ballets of white rabbits, with ears that the sun made luminous pink, frisked, cropped and fed on daisies. Duff would leave King David and, speculating about the Psalms, forget time, staring fascinated by their tricks and manners. He loved young animals tenderly, and old ones only a little less. At sundown the whole welter would be snatched up by their twilit white ears and thrust into their lettuced bolting-hutches.

  This year too began the “arable” waste-lands, building-plots ploughed gratis for me by a neighbouring farmer. Conrad would teach me how to plant them with Hungry Gap kale and mangels. The fly would have the kale and it would be to do again, with always the last resort of dibbing in some turnips or swedes. Hoeing filled every spare moment. The crops were bumper. No one molested us, the coast was clear. The usual mosaic of cartons, tins and silver-foil, both sides of our chestnut fence, had vanished, leaving fresh sands and in the little wood only the black pellets of goats.

  I was happy, yet the news always seemed worse. Rangoon went in March. Singapore had fallen a month sooner. Conrad wrote:

  O dear! Libya and Tobruk! I feel anything may happen and Egypt may be lost in a jiffy like Singapore. They seem to be preparing us for Malta going now. I can’t help wondering all the time if we could repel an invader. Why should the Home Guard fight any better than the Hong Kong, Singapore, Crete and Tobruk people? Why? We just believe in a happy-go-lucky way that it will be all right on the night. How awfully bad it looks! And at any moment the German airborne troops may arrive in Africa in thousands. There’s not much agreeable in the world except Bognor. Bang, bang, bang! there goes Jerry! And we all say: “Quite like old times.”

  Tavistock writes: “I and my friends will be wanted when the country is tired of politicians.” Wanted? I jolly well hope not, unless it’s by the police.

  One happy morning brought me a bombshell of a benignant kind—a suggestion that Captain Frend of the Enchantress, now in command of H.M.S. Phoebe, and shortly due to sail the deadly Atlantic from Canada, cou
ld bring my son home in his cruiser. Duff was overjoyed, but my excitement was naturally tempered by fears of the cruel sea. In September John Julius was booked for Eton and Duff was thinking of this more seriously than I was. I wrote discreetly to Kaetchen in March 1942:

  I was at Ditchley with Henry Luce. It will have given him a very erroneous picture of English country life. There’s nothing lacking there, but you can’t get anything anywhere else. Winston dresses night and day, and I imagine in bed, in the same little blue workman’s boiler suit. He looks exactly like the good little pig building his house with bricks. On his feet he bears inappropriately a pair of gold-embroidered black slippers that I gave him—more suited to the silk-stockinged leg of William Pitt. Over all this, if chilly, he’s got a quilted dressing-gown, once Pooh-Bah’s of The Mikado fame, woven in bright spectrum colours. New neighbours dropping in think, I imagine, that it is ceremonial dress, as he never excuses its eccentricity.

  My farmer has lost two stone. He works too hard. I let him come here weekly because I can’t live without him, and also the train and company and light chores rest him.

  Now for a serious topic—John Julius. A friend of ours who commanded Enchantress will call on you. He is due to return by sea under what sound to me advantageous circumstances, and will, if I like, bring John Julius home. In telegrams I will refer to “the visit,” to “Junior” and to his “uncle.” The scheme sounds wonderful, but he couldn’t of course take Nanny on a warship. It would be a tremendous adventure for the boy and make up for the sneers of friends who have borne the blitz without him. All these plans are dependent on views about the invasion. We are so gloomy about the Orient that things nearer home don’t seem so near.

  Many code telegrams about Uncle and Junior’s visit were exchanged, always without dates. I did not know if it would be this year, now or never. I could only importune God with prayers and try not to talk about it, even to Duff. When Wade rushed into my dairy, her eyes streaming, to tell me she’d taken the news of his arrival on the telephone we mingled our tears like two fountains in the sunshine.

  Telegram to Kaetchen

  Dear dear custodian of my treasure ten million thanks for improving it and returning it bigger and better.

  May 1942

  John Julius has arrived safely from the sea-cemetery and I am absolutely delighted with him. I think him good-looking and wonderfully disposed, ever happy and considerate and affectionate. He shows a sweet resolve to say everything here is good—the food, the scarcities, the lack of service. He had a wonderful crossing on the cruiser and it will be an experience to brag about when others vaunt their Atlantic flights of eighteen hours, for he has kept watch for submarines. He arrived on Thursday, and by Monday I got him pupilled to two tutors in Chichester for Latin verse and general things. Canada taught him better mathematics than he’d have got here. June 15 he has to pass, if he can, an examination called Common Entrance, which applies to all our Public Schools, and determines what form he takes. He has no misgivings and is quite confident of passing in a blaze of honours.

  Don’t scold me for reclaiming him (I knew you would) and don’t impute selfishness to me. After two years one is used to being without a child who from now on will spend most of his years at school. The perils of the journey well out-weighed selfish desires. But for his character and his fame he must be in England now—not as an acte de présence, but he must be part of it, breathe the same air as his generation have to breathe, gas or no gas, fight the same fight and not be lapped in peaceful luxury. You say “physiologically and psychologically he is better in the U.S.” I agree with neither. The food here is A1, any child with a mother worth her salt has all the eggs he needs, mountains of bread; chocolates and oranges and filthy fish-oils go to children only, thank God. Psychologically there is no deterioration here, or lack of balanced aspiration or common sense or courage, and no shade of hysteria or neurosis in any of the children I have known and now see growing to the age when they must “take it;” Billy Wallace, the Benson boys, the Mannerses, Henry Uxbridge—the telephone rings and my chain of thought breaks. Lucky, as a bit about not living by bread alone was coming.

  Now was the happiest peak in the war’s black range of mountains. John Julius’s English morning face lit my days. His laugh was infectious and the hard labour was lightened for me by his hands and heart. Half the day he was coached in Chichester, with the result that he took the creditable place of Upper Fourth. I wrote again to Kommer:

  I took John Julius to Mr Herbert’s house at Eton on September 15. He had no trepidations beforehand though the first half at Eton is considered by all a convulsion. We went there for the day a week before to buy him a top hat and second-hand trousers out of a rag-and-bone heap. His second-hand football-boots make him into a Little Tich. The place looked lovely, but no description of squalor by Dickens or Zola can paint the “low” of Eton. As against this, there’s a room to oneself, free range of the town, freedom to go to which tea-house you please, to telephone from the post-office and no questions asked, to do your homework when you like, suddenly to be as grown-up as an undergraduate. It delighted us both, but after all it’s only the liberty of all “less privileged” schoolboys.

  Conrad wrote from Mells in October:

  I travelled from Paddington with a Lance-Corporal who quoted Juvenal to me in Latin and alluded lightly to Plato’s Republic. The conversation must have continued on a high level, as he certainly mentioned the following people—Confucius, Buddha, Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Gandhi, Dreyfus, Roger Casement, Voltaire, Rousseau and many others. He told me that before the war he was a prize-fighter and acrobat. I don’t think I have ever spoken to a prize-fighter before. They seem to be highly cultivated men.

  My girlhood’s friend Phyllis de Janzé, once Phyllis Boyd, often mentioned in these pages; Phyllis who had learnt to dance the tango with me; who had shared my room when my sisters married and with it all confidences and escapades and heart-aches; Phyllis of the coarse tongue of another age—Restoration perhaps—which suited her gusto and gave no offence; Phyllis of the flowing feline limbs and Egyptian scarab eyes that read and re-read for thirty years an unliftable illustrated volume of Balzac’s entire works, was ill. Since the war began she had exchanged the Comédie Humaine for an enormous atlas in which to follow the grim progress of the battles. She studied our defeats with the same scrutiny as she had traced the recurring characters in the Balzac cat’s-cradle. She brought both these books, her strange freehand embroidery, subconsciously worked in bright silks, and her emaciated beauty to Bognor. Death’s hand was on her, and after weeks of undeviating decline she went back to a London hospital by ambulance, her magical eyes flowing with tears of weakness. It rent my heart to see her go, unrecoverable as I knew her to be. I put her in the care of Max Beaverbrook, in calamity of all guardians the most careful and generous. She had lived in my cramped little lodge, tended by me and her faithful-unto-death maid Ellen for weeks—a cottage delectable enough in sunny weather, but summer had been a chill winter of rain and restless winds and the perpetual moan of sirens. She resented the death she did not fear for separating her from the man she had long loved, and from the victorious end of the war she was intent upon seeing. Nothing of her that remains!

  Hutchie too was ill unto death, though still able to be at Bognor for rests and change. His ending was bound to grieve his idolising family, and not least me, who had known twenty years of tender friendship and rollicking fun. Lowered by the losses to come, I wrote to Kaetchen:

  When November looms I think I’ll pack up. I’m down, and there won’t be enough to do here. In London I can work at munitions, motor-transport, canteen, a thousand things; here the cow will dry up, hens can lay by, pigs can go to market shrieking wee, wee, wee, Michaelmas is catching up on the geese, cheese is stocked on shelves, 60 lbs of honey are jarred, the refugees can eat what we leave of the rabbits. I feel smug with my granary full. Duff is happier, he’s finished David and enjoys his new hush-hush job. It�
�s hard work and interesting; he lives during mid-week in his own house under Daisy Fellowes’s kind protection. Emerald Cunard cabled she was trying to get back. I do wish I could conjure her home; she’d be so much happier here. Hutchie is dreadfully ill and that is another chain of sorrow to drag. He’s too ill to defend me when I come up next week before the local justice hand in hand with a baker who gave me dry bread for my animals.

  Bread in these days was a dangerous commodity. I used to salvage sackfuls of stale loaves every other day in my trailer. Once I almost cut off a mouse’s tail with a carving knife as I sliced through the hard crust and crumb, but part of the haul was sometimes a little fresher. In Bognor one morning I was challenged by what was then called a “snooper,” and ordered to show the contents of my ponderous sacks. Caught red-handed, I was summoned before the magistrate. Conrad, full of sympathy and solicitude, wrote:

  You’ll see by enclosed that the Frome Bench has given costs against Lord Woolton’s “snoopers.” I’m sure these prosecutions are unpopular. I think you ought to get a local solicitor to defend you and instruct him well beforehand. He must say the prosecution is a scandalous waste of time and sheer frivolity. Why in God’s name should a baker give away bread which is edible? It’s an insult to Bognor tradesmen, who certainly aren’t half-witted but good, careful men of business. It is wasting the time of our respected Bench to bring such an idiotic charge—in war-time too when we are all so busy.

  Then you and Wadey and Mrs King, the baker’s wife, all go into the box and say on oath that only stale bread was used. If Duff won’t go in the box, subpoena him and he can write a letter saying he never saw fresh, edible bread used. Put the two snoopers in the box for ruthless cross-examination, and on eliciting that they didn’t cut open or taste the bread feign astonishment. “What? You didn’t taste it? But how in heaven’s name can you judge if a thing is fit for human consumption without tasting it?” Was it the sort of bread they would be satisfied with at an hotel? Or be content to buy at the fixed price? If yes, then why did the baker give it away? Is it their experience of shopping in Bognor that the shopkeepers give away their goods? It isn’t usual, you know.