Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  Duff was on the airfield when we came down about 10.30. It was brilliant and warm, and a pretty tame gazelle (it was sure to die) with Victory horns, also two sneering peacocks, greeted me in the court of the villa, gifts of the Boushaga with whom Duff had been invited to shoot in the desert. The Rolls Royce emblazoned with the Arms of England had arrived. It would make our visits to the Russians less humiliating. It purred at the door on the following radiant morning to take us on a week’s official trip to Algerian and Moroccan centres, but as so often happened we were recalled by telegram after two days.

  The garden now was a wilderness of flowers. The days grew hourly hotter. For luncheon we sought cool dark rooms and the loggia was forsaken. All the world from Poles to Antipodes, from the four continents, must pass through Algiers (there was no other way) and every week my happiness increased, to my surprise and conscious delight. Doom was behind us. Landings in France were said to be near and were to be immediately followed by victory.

  Integration as a law had made a millennium of Algiers. Lambs and lions lay together. De Gaulle was still a rub. It was a sore fatigue for Duff to get that Giraffe to lie down with our Duckling.

  For refreshment we would climb to Chréa, a resort in the Atlas shaded by the glimmering magic of cedars, peopled by singing children and carpeted with flowers. North Africa became to me a brave new world. I would have liked this phase to have lasted a hundred years, and D-Day to have been postponed for as long, but the sands I knew were running out, though the last grain’s date was still unknown to me.

  I wrote to Conrad at the end of May:

  Tonight with Bogo was worse than ever. Just the hideous four of us, no vodka this time and a dreadful piece of dehydrated caviar which I took for pumpernickel and ate a mouthful of, or rather bit and spat out. Conversation flowed like glue; so did the single bottle of white wine. Duff did not try. I tried with the devil’s help and was really nasty, but they did not realise it. They don’t realise anything outside the U.S.S.R. They are as smug as oysters and totally ignorant of anything European. I asked them, knowing the answer, if they saw much of the French Resistance people coming out of France. No, they didn’t, nor (their faces betrayed) had they worried to enquire about it. They delight in putting one in the wrong too, making one out ignorant or outdated or frivolous. “Chez nous, nous constatons …” is the opening of most phrases. We talked of schools and of what is taught. I said that my child read well at four. They said: “Chez nous on lit à huit ans. C’est mieux.” To questions like: Do they teach you religion, languages, tact, manners, psychology? (really nasty questions) they answer “No” with satisfaction and serene unconsciousness of one’s dig. After dinner chess was suggested. Bogo played as fast as tennis and volleyed the pieces about. This naturally upset Duff, who lost his queen in three moves and the game in about ten. Never again do I endure such an evening!

  Mornings are still taken up with parcels for the Croix Rouge. The poor imprisoned Frogs are getting nothing of any charm or nutritive value in their parcels now—soap and chocolate both off, coffee not reliable, and this morning the dates gave out, so it’s back to dehydrated carrots. It’s a microcosm of the lunacy of war. Thousands of hours of energy, tons of packing-material, cases, nails, tins; a whole country (Switzerland) choking itself with stuff being sent into Germany and as much being sent out. Couldn’t it be done without exchange, I mean prisoners fed well by the country of their cages?

  Algiers

  Beloved John Julius, it is our Silver Wedding Day, June 2nd, 1944. If you had not come to me so late in time, you might be twenty-three years old and fighting outside Rome. Thank you for being late. I wonder if you had any choice—if you chose us and the year? It’s possible. I feel sadly happy. Twenty-five years gone is the sad part. I’m crying a bit as I write, but they’ve been lovely years with no storms for Papa and me—not one—and I love him as much as ever I did. Some strange almost unknown Frenchman has sent me a silver necklace, very massive and chased with demon motifs. It’s round my neck as I sit up in bed; nightcap and common pink silk nightgown don’t marry very well with its barbarity. You may see Papa before you see this. I hope you do, but I’ll be miserable here without him.

  He’s gone! His departure weighed heavily at dinner and weighs worse tonight. Wormwood had been intolerable to the end and he finally left without any of his peers on an English York. I dared not go to the airfield.

  8 a.m.

  4 June

  They should have landed by now. When shall I hear? There are voices in the hall that sound cheerful, so bad news hasn’t yet come. I must fettle my fine joints and go chalet-hunting in Chréa as if all was going to be well. We could requisition one—we are commissars. C.-in-C. Jumbo Wilson has taken three on this system and surrounded them with a luxury camp. But I wouldn’t have the face to grab someone else’s house for a whim.

  It’s surely strange that Browning in “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” says

  Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve;

  For flowers—as well expect a cedar grove!”

  Yet beneath Chréa’s cedars are pansies, daisies and unknown eyes springing from thick and vivid green grass.

  Algiers

  5 June

  And Rome entered! What a hideous day was yesterday. By 10 a.m. I was frantic, imagining shooting down, forced landing in France, imprisonment, torture, watery graves, fiery cremations. I had to seek d’Astier de la Vigerie out for comfort. He told me not to hope until 2 or 3 p.m. He also told me that madly disappointed as he was at not being on the Luftfahrt he thought it made sense. If the meeting is to be sentimental, better a lone Worm broadcasting from England to France; the visit of a crowd of Ministers and nothing done but the dropping of tails, would look ridiculous. If it is to be a serious tri-part discussion, then the nobs can fly quickly to the table-talk. Ecstasy of relief (too quickly got used to) at five when news of their arrival came.

  The dread of landings is upon me—so many to pray for; two Mannerses, four Bensons (all by name), Henry Uxbridge now in Italy, Daphne Wakefield’s husband, Enid Jones’s and Ruby Lindsay’s son, Michael Tree, Rex. Rex worries me most. They can’t all survive.

  Algiers

  6 June

  DER TAG indeed! Sweeney came in with the news from the radio at nine. Not unexpected but none the less overpowering. I had the joy of being the first to tell my fellow-packers. They gathered round me in a ring of gasping excitement. To them, poor fools, the war was over. They were settling what to take home. Prisoners’ parcels seemed senseless now. I had to damp it all.

  It’s evening and we get no news. I don’t suppose at this juncture that you do in England either, but you get rumours and atmosphere. We feel suddenly removed and isolated. We thought the King’s speech marvellous. Was it?

  8 June

  Lunched tête-à-tête with Emmanuel d’Astier. The man’s a spellbinder and no mistake. He told me the Supreme C.-in-C.’s speech could not possibly have been more horrible for the Free French, and that he could hear between the lines of Wormwood’s broadcast what an exploding rage he was in and that the situation was degenerating. (Why?) Emmanuel is an idealist and a poet, unambitious and passionate, he says.

  Algiers

  10 June

  Wonderful letters from the ones I love—you, Duff and John Julius. Duckling’s headquarters must be quite near from what I hear from Duff. He stayed at Anthony Eden’s house. He tells me too that he (Duff) had great success when ructions arose and threatened to break the whole meeting up. Wings spread ready on the airfield—but now from the French broadsheet it looks very black again and seemingly past repair.

  The day had its heavy cloud. I never nursed a dear gazelle but it was sure to die, and the poor pet had been true to its tradition and lay stiff and stark among its uneaten roses and tobacco. It was to have been its wedding day. I had found a bride and was to have brought her to the groom this very afternoon. Did he die of a broken heart? Waiting was too long. No one could expl
ain hope to him. It had become a custom to visit the peacocks and gazelle after our meals. It filled the polite half-hour and moved the guests imperceptibly to their cars.

  Algiers

  15 June

  Write me your prognostications. Three months is the general idea here. It’s slow, very slow. Wormwood, thank God, has gone to France and is said to be returning on Saturday or Sunday. I pray Duff returns safely with him, or is he sure to snatch a few extra days for the sake of White’s and the girls? Freddie Fane has found six bottles of good champagne to celebrate his return with, and I have the Yugoslav choir to praise him. One imagines which he will like best.

  17 June

  Duff due today at 7 a.m. I won’t repeat the old sagas of anxiety. Suffice it to say that after hours of pain, blood, sweat and tears, at 12.30 de Gaulle’s wings, gay with tricolor and Croix de Lorraine blazoned on the fuselage, touched down, amid bands of Marseillaise, Spahis, sailors and Senegalese, all the Ministers (my Emmanuel outstanding as Saul). The first words Wormwood was asked by several sympathetic-to-me Frenchmen were “Has the Ambassador’s plane left Rabat?” and they tore back from their felicitations-group to tell anxious me the good news that it was due in fifteen minutes. I was standing back on account of trouser-trouble. Sure enough the great York flew into sight a few minutes later, and out stepped Duff, followed to my huge delight by Victor Rothschild, portly in khaki and generally delightful. He took a cooling bath, fell with all his big weight on the bathroom tiles, and is now half-incapacitated with swollen knee and bandages. Duff was in fine form. I gathered that the mission has not been quite the failure I feared.

  23 June

  Elba taken with tides of blood by our Admiral “Salt” Troubridge and General de Lattre.

  4 Juty

  The town is gay as bunting can make it with Stars and Stripes, fists and sickles and tricolors—no Union Jacks, no monarchists. Troubridge returned gloriously robust. In the evening we dined with Wormwood. He had a sweet, innocent face, smiling with satisfaction. I had noticed this cat-canary look at Mr Murphy’s American Independence party. Was it some trick of light? No, there it was still last evening, not that it made the grim little party less sticky. Jumbo was there and Cunningham (C.-in-C.), Palewski and Miss Wormwood, newly arrived from Oxford. I talked about the United States and told him how the Pallio race was run in Siena. What makes one select the subject guaranteed to bore him? Because one cannot learn that people’s interests are totally different from one’s own. Then I tried Australian fauna, a palpitating subject to me, the emu, wombat, koala bear, lyre-bird, duck-billed platypus and wallaby, all comparatively tame and probably unique in the world. He gloomily said “Il parait qu’il y a des kangarous,” proving that he was listening but not amused.

  Victor Rothschild had left for Roman bomb-dispersal, so the house was less happy. Now Randolph Churchill would gladden my heart and make things hum.

  6 July

  Randy rang up from the hotel to say could he bring Evelyn Waugh? So he’s swallowed something; it must have been his pride. Randy is thin and grey, keen and sweet. Evelyn is thin and silent. I had to put them both on improvised beds in the unused dining-room. Evelyn came up and sat in a grey, dejected heap without a word, a smile or a nod. Later, when I was alone with him, the girls having left in disgust, I asked the knight-at-arms what ailed him. He said that he was never so happy in his life; he had just written a book that he thought a masterpiece, he had no money troubles, a wife he adored, three fine children, splendid health and now an active life calling him to Yugoslavia with his beloved Randolph. His serenity knew no bounds. I said I wished he could reflect his happiness a little more. He said that other people had said the same to him. He doesn’t speak at meals. Duff has a royal time at the table’s top with two gay girls beside him, flanked by Randolph and other staff. I sit at the dank end croaking in a Frog pond, watching as I flounder the gaiety on the bank.

  Emerald said to Duff on the first night of the V.1’s launchings that it showed how idiotic the war had made people to think they should believe in such rubbish, but the waiter had said, and so had several fools here, that unpiloted planes prove how short of men Germany is! That’s the classic English attitude and I do love it.

  15 July

  The great quatorze was a bit of a flop. A “no-women” order forced me on to the streets. Mrs Chapin (U.S.) and Madame and Mademoiselle de Gaulle “crashed” it. I had quite a good time shoving, clapping and running madly in a crowd to catch a glimpse of Wormwood, though I was going to see him with ease at tea. I like my celebrities seen through difficulties, and I like to run for them, not sit and speak with them. My companion wasn’t much of a hand at that sort of thing, and no more are you, my darling, nor Kaetchen, Hutchie, Carl, Duff or anyone I’ve known but Raimund. No matter, he did his best. Then there was a reception at de Gaulle’s. He looked in the pink but pretended not to be. Mademoiselle helped me to some warm lemonade and the inevitable éclair. There was an Archevêque in brilliant puce, a very big-sized White Father and the widow of the Governor of Equatorial Africa, a negress of the jettiest shade dressed in French widow’s crêpe weeds.

  Palewski has been to lunch to tell us all about Washington. They cannot but admit that it was a gigantic success. F.D.R. said at lunch, off the record, that it was an historic occasion when his friend Charles de Gaulle came as an ally. People had tried to oppose the meeting, had done much to retard it, but he had overcome the troubles and now all was well. The old buffer had been the onlie begetter of spanners, and seeing his Press and his State Department against him on the subject of France, and the election galloping on, he had to do a volte-face. That’s about the size of it. Meanwhile we look a bit silly, waiting on him and appeasing him as we timorously did. He now outstrips us in recognition of the Provisional Government and we appear the laggards and obstructionists. When Wormwood went to see General Pershing (senile of course and I think in a home), the old man’s first question was: “Tell me, General, and how did you leave General Pétain?” Wormwood replied: “Well, I haven’t seen him since 1940, but his pictures show him in good health.”

  25 July

  Darling J.J.

  On this day of all days Randolph staggered in looking like the man that was—grey-haired, ashen-faced, black pits harbouring dead blue eyes, emaciated, with perished thighs and bandaged knees. I was really alarmed. His story was horrible. The pilot had miscalculated the runway on landing in Yugoslavia, had tried to rise, had lost speed, stalled and crashed. Randy was in the tail with Evelyn and Philip Jordan. The plane took immediate fire, though Randolph can’t remember seeing flames. The door had buckled and wouldn’t open; by tugging at it they made a kind of gap through which four of them slipped. Ten were killed, nine saved. Evelyn’s hands are burnt, Philip Jordan is also burnt a bit. Randolph’s injuries are water on knees, jolted spine and obvious shock, yet his spirits are ebullient as ever. He lies in a hot cupboard upstairs and is carried down to the sitting-room by four Wop gorillas.

  Eve Curie fills another room with her beautiful face, khaki and medals, dreams of echelons and mêlées and garde-à-vous. The house is overloaded and has burst its boiler. Victor has the best room and is too big for it. I have to drive him to the docks now with a bag of ticking bombs. The car bumps and hurtles down the shelled roads, and Victor will tell me not to forget the danger-freight and I’ll be thankful if we make the Orion and dump them.

  27 July

  It’s like a madhouse these days. Randolph stumbles in at 8.30 when Papa is still in his bath and says: “Can I have my breakfast here?” I say yes. A few minutes later Victor lollops in, tray in hand, and plunks it on the bed. When Sweeney arrives with Papa’s tray there is no place to put it. Papa leaving his contiguous bathroom gives one look, renounces his coffee and leaves the house. Freddie Fane joins the party to make plans, but the two toughs bawl and shout so that he gives it up. Garde-à-vous Eve marches in in khaki. I beg her to stay, but she asks permission not to make up her mind about pres
ence or absence at meals, and is off. The boys “light up” and quarrel across me. I get the trays taken away, hoping that the boys will go with them. No! “Can I lie on your bed?” Randy says. “Yes.” They remain even when I get up (so that I have to dress in the bathroom), sprawling in bath-towels or underpants. Once I’m gone they jump into my bed and put their dirt-crusted feet on my sheets and sweat into them, cover them with ash and burn them with butts. I love them both, but O, I’m tired and get no moment to write or read or think.

  The doctor came at noon and thinks badly of Randolph’s legs. He is not to put them to the ground for a week, and to have electric treatment, so now we have him where we want him.

  About this time came heartbreaking tidings, the saddest that the war brought me.