Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  All too soon for Diana they moved on. The last lap took fourteen hours, and Claire Booth Luce, a fellow-passenger, brightly announced that typhoons were predicted. She also reported that all white women were being evacuated from Singapore. Duff was reading War and Peace and was entirely happy throughout the flight, but Diana was reading Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and found it insufficiently gripping to distract her from the horrors ahead. In the event both Mrs Luce’s predictions proved false and the Coopers arrived safely in Singapore in early September.

  It was the city of her dreams: ‘no trams, nothing of Birmingham or Kansas City or smoke and squalor of ports’. It was full of character and charm, with endless fascinating streets of indefinable period crumbling under her eyes. The street-restaurants smelt better than Prunier’s, with succulent little baked crabs and delicacies in sang-de-boeuf bowls. The atmosphere was Sino-Monte-Carlo with flashes and whiffs of Venice ‘most frail, tarty and peasant-pompous – there is the working life of the Chinks going on before your eyes down every street – coffin-making, lantern-painting, a tremendous lot of shaving. I never tire of strolling and peering and savouring.’

  She settled down to learn Malay, so as to be able to communicate with the servants, but since most of them were Indians or Chinese, the incentive to study hard was limited. Ah-hem, the amah, could not speak to the cook, who in turn had no language in common with the gardener. A police chauffeur called George, who looked like Genghis Khan and wore a red badge meaning that he could speak English, was the only link with the household. Sen Toy, the butler, was particularly hard to make contact with: once Duff asked for his driver and got a bottle of crème de menthe. Diana had elegant lanterns painted with Chinese characters and hung round her bedroom, but had no idea whether she was ‘advertising trusses, or aphrodisiacs, or the price of a roger for all I know’. The house was delightful, a villa but open to the winds with a rough garden of flowering forest trees and neatly clipped cypress and hibiscus hedges. All the walls seemed to fold back and there was only a minimum of furniture. To complete the décor she bought a jade-green parakeet with scarlet cheek and nose. Diana would slip the ring of his chain on to a long bough of hibiscus and perch him on a flower-vase, where he glowed like a rare jewel.

  As a holiday home it would have been idyllic. Unfortunately Duff had a job to do, and a job that led inevitably to irritation and frustration. His powers were no more than inquisitorial; enough to cause suspicion and alarm, yet too little to do anything about the deficiencies in Singapore’s defences. Sir Shenton Thomas, the Governor, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, the Commander-in-Chief, considered him an ignorant mischief-maker; he felt them to be complacent and negligent. To add to his problems, Anthony Eden was sniping at him from London, sending offensive telegrams urging him not to interfere in matters beyond his sphere. Duff replied in a fury, saying that he would return at once if the Government’s confidence in him was anything less than complete. ‘Anthony has always been Duff’s thorn,’ commented Diana. ‘He’s a shit!’ His outburst temporarily soothed Duff, but he was worried and fretful and for once in his life slept badly. One fearful night a ‘brain-fever bird’, whose speciality was uttering a single gloomy note at two-second intervals, perched on the tree outside their bedroom window. Duff was quickly hysterical with rage and soon Diana, half in tears, was imploring him not to bombard the darkness with the Ming pieces which she had lovingly acquired.

  Though she knew that he was delighted she was there, Diana was uneasily aware that her presence in some ways made things more difficult for Duff. Thomas and Brooke-Popham, who insisted on regarding his visit as a fleeting one, took the fact that she had accompanied him as proof of the Coopers’ frivolity and amateurishness. It was still worse when Diana made it clear that she expected to accompany her husband on his journeys around the area. A brief trip across the straits to Johore was considered in order, though even that almost ended in disaster when the Sultan’s baby elephant reached out affectionately with its trunk and tried to rip her skirt off, but things were different when it came to flying to Java in a Hudson bomber. No place for a woman, said Brooke-Popham firmly; no time for joy-riding either, his attitude implied. Duff concurred. Diana fought the decision and, at midnight on the eve of his departure, Duff decided that peace at home was more important than a sense of injury among his colleagues and ruled that she should come after all. She almost rued her victory when the Dutch Governor held forth about the variety and venom of the local snakes. ‘Do they come into the house?’ she gibbered. ‘Not into this house,’ said the Governor consolingly, ‘but into the guest house many times.’ She would be ill-advised to pick up anything unless quite sure that it was not going to move.

  The same battle took place when Duff was to visit Kuala Lumpur by train. Urged by his staff he turned on her. ‘I make everything more difficult – don’t I know that I’m only here on sufferance? I mustn’t lose face everywhere by not giving warning of my visit.’ Diana sulked and once again ‘sweet Duff showed remorse and said I could do what I liked always’. So along she went in the imperial train – yellow and chocolate with crowns all over it. Joe Alsop boarded the train at 5.30 a.m. at a wayside stop, having no idea she was aboard, and blundered into her cabin to find a chalk-white-faced mummy swathed in netting and not at all in a mood for visitors.

  After this it was taken for granted by everyone that she would accompany Duff on all his journeys. Burma and India were next. In Rangoon Diana caused deep offence by removing her shoes and stockings and paddling off into the Shwe Dagon pagoda while Duff and the other dignitaries hovered nervously outside. Such conduct, the Governor explained, was most improper for a sahib, let alone a memsahib, and could well lead directly to the loss of Burma. Diana was unimpressed. Even her spirits, however, were somewhat daunted by the pomp of vice-regal Simla. It was the combination of grandeur and discomfort which most disconcerted her; regiments of servants in sumptuous uniforms, yet nobody prepared to clean a pair of shoes. Nor was the Viceroy’s idea of camping quite what she approved of, though Duff liked it exceedingly. ‘It was what a camp should be,’ he told Venetia Montagu. ‘Dozens of servants, a hot bath in your tent, and an observant orderly ever at your elbow with a gimlet or a chotah peg.’ Lord Linlithgow advised speaking to a visiting maharajah ‘as you would to a very nice local parson’; which seemed to Duff sound counsel. But Duff was preoccupied by his future and the problems of his job. To him, too, Eden seemed a perpetual threat: ‘I sometimes feel, probably without cause, that certain people will try to do me down in my absence. A.E. is the worst.’

  Soon after their return from India, Duff prepared and despatched his report for the Cabinet. His chief recommendation was that a Commissioner General should be appointed, to co-ordinate all British policy in the East. To Diana it seemed alarmingly likely that such an office would be created and Duff picked to fill it; an appointment that would condemn them to exile for the duration of the war and perhaps longer. Only when faced by such a possibility did she realize how much she hankered after England, her friends, her cow. ‘The future is made of terror this morning,’ she told Conrad. ‘Soon our fate will be in the balance at 10 Downing Street.’

  Meanwhile they planned their longest visit, to Australia and New Zealand. Diana was apprehensive about Australia. A lady from the Sydney Post had been to see her and had warned her that she should expect a rough reception. Noel Coward had been there recently and had been asked in so many words whether he was a bugger. ‘You’re nothing but a bloody queen,’ another journalist had told him. The Australians, Diana had been assured, were labouring under an inferiority complex; were determined to be high-hatted and Ritzed, and even called their farmers ‘graziers’. She was in dismay as their aircraft neared its destination:

  What is there as a reward for the flight? No pagodas, no anthropophagi, nothing but ugliness and discomfort. I am writing now with Australia laid out beneath me for seven and half hours. I have not seen one human habitation. Nothing
but utterly arid plain without tree or river. Perhaps it is seasonal. One can only hope so – but the lack of humans can’t be.’

  Her sourness did not survive the beauty of the country and the warmth of their reception. ‘Papa and I have had a triumphal procession through Australia,’ she told John Julius. ‘They were crazy about us; don’t ask me why.’ Everywhere she met people who had crossed her path in England: at Belvoir, at Rowsley, at Bognor; filled with questions, goodwill, warmly inaccurate remembrances of the past. Robert Menzies particularly impressed her; bone-idle, she was told, but head-and-shoulders above the other politicians. Diana had met him in London with Chips Channon and had been delighted at his amiable mockery of their host. ‘Never knew such a fellow for royalty,’ he said. ‘He’s like a water-diviner. He’d smell out a prince anywhere.’ As Channon laughed rather hollowly the butler arrived to announce that the Duke of Kent was on the phone. In Australia Menzies was quite as refreshing. Best of all, when Duff sounded him out about the possibility, he made it obvious that he would relish the post of Commissioner General if it were offered him.

  New Zealand was another matter. It seemed to her to exemplify every English attribute which she most disliked – smug, insular, mediocre. ‘The blood of New Zealand is so stale that they are reverting to type,’ she told Marjorie Anglesey; ‘Maori-type – growing longer torsos and weeny legs, and you can’t get a bed in a loony bin.’ They had imported all the English pests so as to feel at home – sparrows and starlings and gorse and newspapers that looked like The Times of forty years before; their houses were smothered in roses; their patriotism was touching; their gentility painful; oh, for a little honest vulgarity: ‘I suppose they are happy. I couldn’t bear it.’ The Governor General epitomized the mediocrity of the country, and his wife was embarrassingly arch. ‘What book are you going to write next, Mr Cooper?’ she asked. ‘Do make it about a lady next time.’ And then, more daringly, ‘Do you and Mr Eden play much Chinese chequers together?’

  Back in Singapore it was clear that war was imminent. ‘There seems to me no defence at all,’ wrote Diana, ‘but I expect I’m wrong. Today a little fleet arrived to help.’ The ‘little fleet’ included the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. Six days after she wrote, the Japanese landed in the north of Malaya. A few hours later Singapore was bombed. Three days later the two great British ships were sunk. It was not to be much longer before Diana’s view of Singapore’s defences was proved tragically correct.

  The next few weeks were rich with muddle and alarm. The Japanese attack came before Duff’s report had been properly considered, long before it had been acted on, and Churchill’s decision to appoint him Resident Cabinet Minister with authority to form and preside over a War Cabinet was a belated emergency measure, not a piece of considered policy. Duff tried hard, but there was precious little to be done. Diana’s main fear was that there would be evacuation of women and children. If this were ordered, she resolved, she would not argue about it, merely wait until the last minute and then hide. Short of being carried forcibly up the gangway, she knew that the only thing that would get her aboard was a reasoned appeal from Duff to her love and loyalty. If she were in hiding, such an appeal could never be delivered. In the meantime she launched a campaign for blood-donors and settled down in Duff’s office to help with the secret work of some of the female secretaries who had left for Australia. ‘I hate being behind the scenes,’ she told Conrad on 28 December.

  Office mismanagement plus Whitehall muddle breaks one’s faith, and the waste of money in cabling and decyphering! No private business would dream of such squandermania. And O, bless me! The flaps from Ambassadors! They are always in a flat spin, and ne’er a decisive thought. A scream of ‘While not…’, a yell of ‘At the same time we agree …’ The Governor and Colonial Secretary grow daily in black, obstructive defeatism plus foxy eelishness. They are violently anti-Duff and do all they can to undermine his powers and push, but the country, the towns, the press and business are against them and the Services are leaning that way, so I think all will soon work with greater dispatch.

  Early in 1942 Diana deciphered the telegram which informed Duff that Wavell was appointed Supreme Commander in the South West Pacific and that his work was therefore at an end. A few days later Wavell arrived. Diana was disconcerted by his silences, but struck by his obvious courage and integrity. ‘The impression he gives is not brightened by his being very deaf and by having one wall-eye drooping and sightless. I suppose he can smell and feel still.’ At least his presence gave her a chance to be indiscreet about the leadership in Singapore, while Duff looked on, half disapproving yet relieved to have the story told in terms more crude than he would have cared to use himself.

  Diana had no illusions that Singapore would long survive their departure. ‘The Germans don’t look too healthy,’ she told John Julius, ‘and we don’t worry about the Wops, but those slit-eyed dwarfs from Japan are a pest.’ The inhabitants would undoubtedly desert at the first bomb and who was to blame them? ‘These poor natives have no traditions and not much understanding, no Nelson to turn in his grave, nor a flag that generations have died to hold high, nor anything to make them face up to fear and sacrifice.’ Nor, she admitted, much reason to risk their lives to defend their white masters. She told herself that she was sad to be deserting the city at its most perilous moment. So she was; she would have been insensitive indeed if she had not felt regret, even guilt, at leaving behind so many people whom she had grown to like. Her servants were touchingly sad to see her go. And yet her main sensation was relief, tinged with exhilaration at being on the move again. Her sensations were, in fact, blurred at the moment of departure. ‘A last gin-sling,’ she demanded, as the cars waited. The Chinese butler thought she said ‘a large gin-sling’. Diana’s gin-slings were always large, this one was enormous.

  It was a protracted return, including in the itinerary a stop-over in the penal settlement of Port Blair, in the Andaman Islands. Surrounded by ‘surly filthy Indians and bad Burmen, criminals to a man’, in a house without light or mosquito nets, deprived of sleep and with no hope of breakfast, Diana passed a night of exquisite discomfort. Then it was on to New Delhi – ‘In our passage we are asphyxiated by the smell of elephant. It may be a dead one in our wing somewhere; it may be dead Viceroy’ – and endless delays at Cairo. Duff was depressed by the fate of Malaya and his own association with it. ‘Papa did an amazingly good job against obstruction from all sides,’ Diana wrote loyally to John Julius, but failure was failure and she knew that it could do no good to his career. ‘It may after all be that the home Government think he has made an appalling balls of it.’ Would he be offered another job or left to fret in semi-retirement? They would find out only in London and they could not get there quickly enough for Diana. On 16 February she stepped from the train at Paddington in white fur coat and Royal Yacht Squadron cap. It was cold, it was drizzling, no one of consequence was there to meet them, but they were home.

  *

  Duff did not find himself in disgrace, but nor did he return in triumph. ‘You were the man in charge,’ Churchill told him reproachfully. ‘Why did you not warn me what was about to happen?’ Duff’s resultant explosion did something to clear the air, but it was several months before he was employed again and then only in a secret, backroom job that kept him well out of the public eye. Ministry of Information followed by Singapore; he knew that the stigma of failure was marked on his career. Diana resented the unfairness more than he did, and did not scruple to plead with Churchill that her husband should have some more dignified employment. At one point it was suggested that Duff should succeed Oliver Lyttelton in Cairo, but the idea died young – mercifully, in Diana’s view, since the three weeks she spent in Egypt on the way back from Singapore had been more than enough for a lifetime.

  For a few months they lived in London, squatting in a flat lent them by the novelist A. E. W. Mason. ‘It smells dreadfully, and artistically it leaves me low, but it is free – Freemason �
� so we are lucky, as ends simply won’t meet.’ Diana worked by day making camouflage-nets on the top floor of the Army & Navy Stores. The task kept her hands occupied, no doubt to the benefit of the war-effort, but it left her mind idle and even the physical demands were limited. She hankered for the farm at Bognor and soon was there again, restocking with rabbits and goats and gradually annexing nearby building sites on which she grew illicit crops of kale and mangolds. Chips Channon visited her and was recruited to drive the pigs, still wearing his Lobb shoes and his Leslie and Roberts suit. They walked to the water’s edge and surveyed the formidable array of barbed wire and spiked ramparts. ‘If only Singapore had been like that,’ said Diana sadly. Then they moved on to admire the latest boiling of pig-swill. ‘To think,’ gushed Channon, ‘the world’s most beautiful woman showing off her swill.’

  John Julius returned from the United States in the summer of that year. The temptation to keep him in safety across the Atlantic was a real one, but Diana had no doubt that it must be resisted. When Kommer protested she replied firmly: ‘For his character and his fame he must be in his country now he is no longer in his babyhood … to be part of it all, to breathe the same air as his people and generation have to breathe, to fight the same fight and not be in Canadian cotton-wool.’