Diana’s mother was concerned in all things theatrical and was abetted in her interest by her closest friend, Lady Tree. The Trees played a great part in Diana’s childhood, indeed in her life. Maud Tree, an actress of minor ability but a formidable wit, was the wife of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the actor-manager whose baroque productions and still more flamboyant style of acting filled His Majesty’s Theatre in the early years of the twentieth century. The Trees were socially no match for the Manners but Violet Granby, though elitist to a fault, demanded talent or money rather than breeding in her friends. Noble blood was estimable, essential certainly when a match was being considered for a daughter, but if its possessor was dull or stupid then he would get short shrift in Arlington Street. The Trees were at the top of the theatrical pyramid and exceptionally good company – that was enough.
Every Christmas the Trees would come to stay at Belvoir. The ritual was unvarying. Sir Herbert, who hated the country and believed any rustic must be either criminal or idiot, would arrive with the family on Christmas Eve. That night a telegram would arrive: crisis at His Majesty’s Theatre, he must return at once to London. Contentedly he would set off for his mistress’s arms on Putney Hill. No one was deceived, least of all Lady Tree, but the proprieties were satisfied.
There were three Tree daughters, two of whom became so closely integrated with the Manners that they might have been sisters. Viola was almost the same age as Marjorie, but her easy-going nature and Diana’s precocity ensured that she became as much a friend of the youngest daughter as of the eldest. ‘Wonderfully large, loose, surprised and disordered,’ Cynthia Asquith called her, and the vision of a high-spirited and coltishly graceful cart-horse emerges from the many descriptions of her. For Marjorie and Diana she was the ideal companion: adventurous, inventive, endlessly enthusiastic. At a party, or for a single performance on the stage, she could be magnificent but she lacked the discipline to make an actress of stature and her career was to fizzle out in mediocrity.
Iris, her sister, was almost as much Diana’s junior as Viola was her senior, but age was never an important consideration for Diana in the selection of her friends. Blonde almost to the point of being albino, bulky and graceless in movement, Iris possessed – said Osbert Sitwell – ‘a honey-coloured beauty of hair and skin that I have never observed in anyone else’. Diana Daly said that she could never decide whether Iris was ‘wildly attractive or utterly repulsive’ and her indecision was not unusual. The one reaction Iris never inspired was indifference: her hunger for new experience, contempt for comfort and convention, reckless questioning of traditional values, made her disapproved by many but loved by her friends. ‘Quelle famille de serpents!’ remarked a French governess, as she shook the dust of the Trees’ house from her feet. If the judgement be fair, Iris was the worst snake of them all.
The Manners rented a cottage at Aldwick, near Bognor and, from the time Diana was six, the Trees every spring and summer used to take rooms in a house nearby. Marjorie described what was, for the whole family, something close to Arcadia:
Bathing by moonlight! Walking as far as one dared up the long, narrow path to the moon, the alfresco dinners with a lamp on the table and no moths or insects ever to trouble us. Herbert in grand form, Max [Beerbohm] in sweetpea-purple and mauve smoking-suit – the fun of it. Primroses like a carpet and tamarisk for a wall, and the beat and suck of the tide, and the rooks overhead fussing, and Maud reading aloud, and sometimes Harry Cust with his wit, out-vying Maud and hers, and laughter and youth – Oh God! – and then we sang and drifted to bed … The first motor too – either Maud or Herbert brought it triumphantly down from London. A Panhard, one mouse-power. The door at the back like a pony cart. Excellent car on the straight, but stopped dead and ran back at the slightest incline.
Bemused, entranced, half asleep, Diana would linger on the fringes of this enchanted circle, praying that nobody would notice her and send her off to bed. Here she first fell in love; with Claude Lowther, an exquisite dandy forty years her senior who found the Manners style of living so disturbingly homespun that he once sent ahead of him his bed and bedding, saying that it was ‘hideous but comfortable and without fleas’. He wrote the eight-year-old Diana a love-letter on Bromo lavatory paper and she thought him the most beautiful and funniest man on earth. Sex was a fact of life for Diana, with no immediate application to her daily activities. Edwardian country-house parties were arranged according to the traditional precept: ‘à chacun sa chacune’. Diana remembered trailing behind her mother while the bedrooms were allotted for a grander-than-usual weekend. ‘Lord Kitchener must have this room and then, of course, Lady Salisbury must be here’; and then, later that evening: ‘If you are frightened in the night, Lord Kitchener, dear Lady Salisbury is just next door.’ The relationship between her calf-love for Claude Lowther and what dear Lady Salisbury presumably felt for Lord Kitchener seemed obscure to Diana, but the matter would no doubt become clear in time.
*
When she was ten Diana fell ill. Though diagnosis then was in its infancy, it seems that she suffered a bad attack of a form of paralysis, known as Erb’s Disease. At one time her life was despaired of. Letty reported that she had just seen their mother weeping. Diana asked why. ‘Because of you. You’re going to die young!’ For several years she led the life of an invalid; cosseted, carried from place to place, confined to darkened rooms, poked and peered at by a succession of specialists. She was treated to a course of galvanism, ‘a big box of plugs and wires and Ons and Offs and wet pads clamped upon me that I might tingle and jerk’. Whether because of or in spite of this remedy, her wasted muscles gradually recovered their strength.
Though she was liberally indulged during her illness, she was never permitted the luxury of self-pity. With a doctor pain was a suitable matter for discussion since it might be an aid to diagnosis; to complain of it otherwise was common. Diana inherited the attitude from her mother and applied it ruthlessly throughout her life to herself and her friends. Ann Fleming, in agony, once tried to escape from a dinner-party at the last moment. Diana was outraged: ‘Only housemaids have pains!’ Obediently Mrs Fleming attended the dinner and was operated on next day for a dangerously twisted gut. Patrick Leigh Fermor suffered from a raging abscess in the ear. ‘There’s no such thing as a pain in the ear,’ said Diana severely. ‘Only a little ache.’ At ten, she never lamented the fate that confined her miserably to bed while her friends and sisters were enjoying themselves; she took it for granted, and developed the tastes for reading, talking and brooding that were to mark her life.
Brooding was part of her nature. Diana had a singular propensity to expect the worst. ‘When I was six,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘and you were late, I used to be sure of your murder and lie awake all night … Quite as young as that I can remember catching my breath often at the dread of family ruin or Father and you separating.’ Her own health inspired equal pessimism. ‘Pretty bad,’ was her invariable reply when asked how she was, not piteously or even regretfully but with the calm resolve of one who faces facts. Every ache was cancerous, every cough tubercular. ‘If I hadn’t heard you were safely back at Chantilly, I would be frantic for fear you were dead as a smelt,’ wrote Martha Gellhorn many years later. ‘Have all the pains and anguishes gone? Was it anything like the year you decided your heart was weak or the year you had cancer? It’s awful to enjoy your ailments as much as I do, but they’ve always been so wonderful, so fatal and so sad that I cannot help liking them.’ At ten Diana was convinced she was going to die, accepted it stoically, and speculated only on the degree of pain that would be involved.
Suppressed emotions must some time emerge. It is tempting to find a link between the rigorous self-discipline which Diana learned as a child and the bouts of black melancholia to which she was prone throughout her life. Far too little is known, however, about the causes and nature of depression to allow any such thing to be more than speculation. Equally right might be the close relation who believed that she suffe
red from being too much the favourite child, weighed down by an impossible burden of loving expectation. Arnold Bennett told Lord Beaverbrook that her melancholy was that of any talented woman who feels herself under-employed. And who could contradict Duff Cooper when he wrote: ‘If the osteopath says your melancholy is caused by a lack of blood in the brain, he doesn’t seem to me to say anything unreasonable. I think your depression has a physical cause’? All that is certain is that from the period of her childhood illness, she suffered from bouts of irrational misery, sometimes lasting a few days, sometimes several weeks, in which all was intolerably black, nothing seemed worth while, even to drag herself from bed to bathroom seemed an unbearable, a pointless effort.
Diana believed that she could pinpoint the moment at which the first fit of depression afflicted her. Aged ten or eleven she walked down the stairs at Arlington Street glowing with contentment, all right with the world. A few moments later she was going up again in darkest misery, asking herself, ‘Why was I happy when I went down? Why am I so unhappy now?’ She never found the answers. But though she feared and resented her disability, she took a modest pride in it, deeming it a distinction which she felt – probably wrongly – was shared by few of her friends. When somebody suggested that her sister Marjorie was also a victim she was indignant: ‘Marjorie doesn’t suffer from depression. She’s just had an unhappy life!’ Diana accepted depression as any other ailment, a subject for regret but not self-pity. She soon evolved a technique for preserving a façade of jollity while secretly in darkest gloom. Her mother, who would have claimed to know everything of importance about her, never suspected the truth. If she had, she would have been uncomprehending and unsympathetic. Only housemaids moped.
TWO
BIRTH OF THE QUEEN OF JERICHO
Though still vested with the reputation of a sickly child Diana was largely recovered from her long illness by the time her father succeeded as Duke of Rutland. Formal schooling would have been almost inconceivable for a ducal daughter but her parents viewed with some dismay the degree to which her education had been allowed to decline or flourish according to her own whim. What was described as ‘the putting-back plan’ was now set in action. It spelt the end, wrote Diana:
of my happy-go-lucky useless life. The new régime is schoolroom tea, stiff music-lessons from snobbish masters, days at the Berlitz and perhaps even solitary confinement at Belvoir, the which bijou maisonette is in my mind the ultima thule.
A few weeks later she reported that she was now ‘une petite fille modèle’, learning Italian and German at the Berlitz, Greek history and singing at Arlington Street.
The year was to widen her horizons in other ways. That summer she spent three weeks with the Trees at Brancaster in North Norfolk. In neighbouring houses a group of Oxford undergraduates were holding a reading party, eager for any diversion that would relieve them of the need to work. Among them were several who were to become Diana’s closest friends. In her memoirs she called the chapter that described this period ‘Brave New World’, and her delighted wonder when confronted by this group of young men could not better be summed up than in Miranda’s ecstatic cry: ‘Oh brave new world, that has such people in it.’
The generation that perished in the First World War has earned by so doing a peculiar lustre. Whether in fact it contained more than the usual share of genius or even talent can never be proved, but the little group of Eton and Balliol men at Brancaster was certainly brilliant enough to dazzle a susceptible fourteen-year-old. Among them Patrick Shaw-Stewart seemed most certain to succeed, if only because he wanted to so desperately. He was pallid, freckled, red-haired, with a face so long that when Marjorie Manners sketched him her pencil slipped further and further down the page until she grew ‘almost frightened’. His academic prowess was glittering – the Ireland, Craven and Hertford Scholarships followed by a First in Greats. This his contemporaries admired, but they were disquieted by his aggressive ambition. His brains and wit were irreproachable, his heart a less certain quantity. Though he had many loyal friends he also had enemies; Julian Grenfell wrote of him: ‘Animals always edged away from him, and the more intelligent they were the further they edged. I think there is something rather obscene about him, like the electric eel at the zoo.’ ‘Not quite long enough in the bottle,’ was Raymond Asquith’s astringent verdict. In one of those truth games in which that generation so delighted, Diana awarded him ten out of ten for intellect, eloquence, sympathy and humour, nine for cleanliness, eight for loyalty and manners, five for looks and none for sincerity. Shaw-Stewart awarded her eight and a half, his maximum, for assurance about the universe.
No one would have given Edward Horner ten out of ten for intellect. He was six foot four inches tall with muscles and shoulders to match, strikingly handsome and with a good-nature and bonhomie that shone from his face. Though probably the most generally loved of the group he could hardly hold his own in wit or wisdom; when he got a poor result in his Oxford finals Raymond Asquith comforted his sister with the reflection: ‘Of course it has been unfortunate for him that owing to his always living with these brilliant young men, and superficially resembling them in habits and catchwords and so forth, he has come to have an impossible standard applied to his own moderate and less disciplined wits.’ Only son of Sir John Horner of Mells, he was the despair of his parents for his drunkenness, gambling and sexual escapades. He lured Lady Cunard’s beautiful parlourmaid to an upstairs room and seduced her after a luncheon party; his elders felt this in poor taste, but the teenage Diana thought it ‘eighteenth-century and droit de seigneur and rather nice’.
Charles Lister was altogether more serious, viewing his friends with mingled affection and disapproval. He was the son of that Edwardian magnifico Lord Ribblesdale and looked the part, ‘his long white patrician face,’ in Laurence Jones’s words, ‘crowned with a tight-curling lack-lustre mat that would not be smoothed or parted’. Unique among his friends he possessed, indeed flaunted, a social conscience; felt that the working classes were miserably misused and argued vigorously in their interest. His socialism, though genuine, was far from revolutionary. To Alan Lascelles he was shortly to protest that he felt the grievances of Labour as strongly as ever but had lost faith in their favoured remedies. ‘If only they could get back to the old sober Trades Unionism and to collective bargaining. But a change of spirit in most of the Trades Unions is required before this is achieved. They are shockingly out of hand.’ Even this modest radicalism he bore lightly, his laugh being daemonic and easily provoked.
Finally Alan Parsons, son of a country vicar but an Etonian like the others, added a touch of glamour with his sombre Renaissance good looks. He lacked the ebullience of Homer, the intellectual distinction of Shaw-Stewart, the idealism of Lister, but had a solidity and good sense not always found among the others. A classical scholar of some merit, he cared more about music, painting, the theatre than did his friends and was more sensitive than they were to the doubts and fears of a fourteen-year-old girl thrust into such company. It was to him that Diana wrote shortly after she left for home: ‘Brancaster was heavenly, wasn’t it? I nearly cried when I left. Do for pity’s sake let’s all meet again soon. I hate making friends and then passing on, don’t you? When one makes friends, I think one ought to go on being friends hard and not let it drop.’ It was a precept she was to follow all her life.
The young men, for their part, were delighted by this pretty, precocious and impertinent child. She distracted them agreeably from their studies and breached their bachelor solidarity without posing any serious threat. Several of them already knew her elder sisters, now they added Diana to their innermost circle. Within the next year or two, long before she officially came out, she had accumulated a rich haul of love-letters. ‘You’re more beautiful every time I see you, and more wonderful and more delicious,’ wrote Patrick Shaw-Stewart. ‘Do love me a little because I love you so much.’ ‘I am glad I told you I loved you as Tristan loved Isolde,’ contributed Charles List
er. ‘Thank you, dear, for saying I’m among your first four or so; one must be thankful for small mercies. I am so happy at finding I can love anybody and that I do love you.’
It would be absurd to attach great significance to such effusions. This was an age of extravagant expression, passion poured forth by men and women whose emotions were often as tepid as their words were ardent. Lister and Shaw-Stewart were probably writing to half a dozen other girls in similar terms. Nor did Diana regard the letters as much more than trophies to be gloated over. Certainly nobody was seriously in love with anyone else. It was, however, still an impressive tally for so young a girl. Diana longed to hasten her advance into the world of maturity. ‘I wish I were there,’ she wrote wistfully to Patrick Shaw-Stewart at a house-party at Gosford. ‘I don’t mean by this that I have any desire to be “out”, but that if it had been within the range of possibilities that a dirty schoolroom lout might ever be invited anywhere, I should like to have been the one.’
In spite of her patent success she constantly questioned her ability to amuse or interest others, shunning tête-à-têtes in which her deficiencies would be uncovered. ‘If we could only form a group,’ she wrote in anguish, ‘so that I need not have the sole responsibility and fear of being discovered to be stupid and dull.’ After fifty years of intensive social life this uncertainty still ran rampant. ‘I can live happily with you,’ she once wrote to Lady Pamela Berry, ‘but an isolated meal gives me fears. I’ve confidence in myself in adventures, active and illicit conditions, forest glades or dark Arab alleys, the darkened cinema, but I have very little in my conversational powers.’ In part because of this lack of self-confidence she hungered for flattery, clamoured for compliments to be passed on by all who heard them. Edward Horner was congratulated on ‘a really good letter teeming with dew-drops which mean to me what wine does to you, and there never was dry common earth more grateful for a touch of moisture or so good at lapping it up’.
Diana Cooper Page 3