She was literally ill with apprehension while he was crossing the Atlantic, but a warship delivered him safely and he was despatched at once to Eton. Her fears were by no means at rest, however. She was haunted by the memory of two Eton boys who had been burnt to death forty years before. Lord Wimborne, a man terrified by fire, used always to take with him a Gladstone bag containing a long rope with a hook at one end. This seemed to Diana a sage precaution, and John Julius was thus equipped when he arrived at Eton. His house master was not amused and returned the paraphernalia next day. Elaborate plans were made on this and similar occasions to avoid his travelling by way of London, but she was determined that her son should not be cosseted. ‘I like him to have as much discomfort as possible,’ she told her sister Marjorie, when he was going to stay at Plas Newydd. ‘No feather-beds or painted rooms. Give him a soldier’s bed in a loft or basement or under the wide and starry.’
In August 1942 Diana had her fiftieth birthday. She did not look her age. The lines of her face were a little sharper, more rigidly defined, but they had lost nothing of their arresting splendour, the love-in-the-mist blue eyes struck home as forcibly as ever; the radiance, the inner glow still burnt fiercely. Nor did she feel fifty. All the old vitality was there, the hunger for new experience, the determination to turn every expedition into an adventure, every meeting into a joyous party. Yet in some ways she had changed. She was more tolerant than thirty years before; no more ready to suffer fools gladly, yet less ready to dismiss a person as a fool merely because he differed from her. She accepted people for what they were, rather than condemned them because they were not what she felt they ought to be. She was less egocentric, still single-minded in pursuit of her ends but more apt now to pursue those ends in the interests of Duff, of John Julius, of one of her multitude of friends. She admitted a wider responsibility towards the world: in the past there had been an inner élite of those she loved and the rest for whom she cared nothing; she still cherished her friends above all things, but she now admitted that the rest too had a right to exist, even that she had a duty to help them on their way. She was wiser; more ready to come to terms with her limitations, more prudent in her judgements, less disposed to rail against a malign and perversely hostile fate.
In other ways she was the same. No one who had known and understood the little girl scrabbling around the turrets of Belvoir would have failed to recognize the same traits in the great lady of 1942. No grande dame, indeed, could have been less grand, more impetuous, more informal. There was the same assertiveness, the same outrageous demands on friends and acquaintances, the same generosity and total loyalty. She had no more respect for authority, was no more disposed to trust dogma because it had always been accepted. Loving tradition, she remained the least conservative of women. The circle of her interests had widened, but the same limitations, the same prejudices flourished. Moral judgements still meant nothing to her; she either liked people or as far as possible ignored them; and if she liked them then they could commit almost any iniquity without forfeiting her affection. She still swung between black gloom and lyrical high-spirits; rejoiced in a place in the limelight and was crippled by painful shyness. Life was still far more fun when she was around. Middle age had not withered her and her infinite variety was still a delight to all who knew her.
*
The Coopers spent eighteen months in England while the war swung gradually in favour of the Allies. Then in October 1943 Duff was offered the post of British Representative to the French Committee of Liberation in recently-liberated Algiers, with the probability that in due course he would proceed as Ambassador to Paris. All his life he had longed to fill this office. He almost lost his chance when Churchill discovered that he was an ardent Gaullist but Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, was detailed to brief him on de Gaulle’s iniquities and the Prime Minister allowed his affection for Duff to overcome his doubts.
It remained to tell Diana. She knew that the appointment would make Duff happy and so gallantly put her best face on it, but the idea filled her with dismay. ‘Flustered, hysterical, funky and giggly,’ she described herself to Bridget McEwen, wholly unsuited to the pomp and circumstance of a great Embassy. Her stumbling, schoolgirl French, ‘the loss of my cow, my plot so lovingly mulched, my few fast-ageing friends, my child, this Eton, this England’; the terrors of flight, all made her feel that she was the unluckiest woman on earth. The diet in Algiers, she was told, was spam and lemons, the lemons no sourer than Algerian wine – what of the cream, the eggs, the cheese, the rabbits of Bognor? French women intimidated her: ‘they make me feel at any time a smelly, untended, untaught, uncouth, dense bumpkin’. What must be must be, however. For the second time Cincinnata put away her plough, dispersed her pigs and chickens and girded her loins for battle.
Duff and Diana arrived in Algiers on 3 January 1944. For the next three months Diana’s correspondence was an almost uninterrupted cry of woe. Their house was the first and most enduring grievance. Evelyn Waugh described it as ‘a charming Arabesque villa’, but to Diana it was the epitome of vulgar ugliness; dark, musty, squalid. The sitting-rooms looked as if they belonged to an inferior brothel; the chimneys smoked, if any fuel could be found to burn in them; the beds were damp and broken. There was no stove, no telephone, no linen or plate. Duff was little help since he was almost blind to his surroundings, though he did join in deploring the lack of hot, or even tepid water. ‘All goes worse than I have power to tell,’ she wailed to Conrad. ‘I have felt for the last three days that once the fearful flight was over nothing else would disturb my mind, and I really believe that it has taken this house, and this house only, to do it.’ Almost their first night Charles Codman from Boston arrived to dinner. Diana, still suffering the after-effects of the drugs she had taken to calm herself for the journey, made matters no better by stoking up on many cocktails and much Algerian wine. ‘She got in a state of exaggerated depression about the ugliness of the villa,’ wrote Duff in his diary, ‘and the impossibility of improving it owing to the complete absence of any commodities in Algiers.’
The house had been found for them by their comptroller, Freddie Fane, formerly Secretary of the Travellers’ Club in Paris, a Mephistophelian figure whom Diana at first distrusted. He would not make the grade, she told Conrad, he was close to collapse, ‘the cold, the shame, his impotence and incompetence are getting him down’. He bought three thousand eggs on the black market, which, as they cost sixpence apiece and there was neither ice nor isinglass in the house, Diana reasonably felt excessive. Gradually he began to prove his resourcefulness, he found prisoners to clear up the house and garden, raided a local cellar to provide drinkable wine. His methods were eccentric, but agreeably flamboyant; when he caught a young Arab stealing from the orchard he crucified him against a stone wall in the full sun. The punishment cannot have been very fearsome, for within six hours of his release the Arab was in the orchard again. ‘I’m getting very fond of old Freddie,’ Diana confessed, after she had been there a month or so. ‘My first impressions, I ought to learn, are always wrong.’
She did not change her first impression of the Rookers. Kingsley Rooker was Duff’s deputy, and not the last of Diana’s grievances was that the two couples had to share the house. In normal circumstances she would probably have found the Rookers harmless if not congenial, but living cheek-by-jowl in acute discomfort proved a strain on everybody’s nerves. Hostilities grumbled for weeks, then erupted when Diana proposed to open the villa gardens to the employees of Duff’s office. Rooker vetoed the idea; one wanted the grounds to oneself, one would get an awful crowd. Duff advised Diana to give way and avoid any more rows. Fuming, she acquiesced, then revived the idea when the Rookers at last moved off to a house of their own. The staff flocked to the gardens and the experiment proved a success. ‘I’m surprised at my own energy and confidence,’ she told Conrad proudly.
Diana’s irritation at the squalor in which they lived was heightened by the
comparative luxury enjoyed by their colleagues. The Americans had heat, light and even a sofa; the Russians disposed of three comfortable villas. Down the road, Harold Macmillan, Minister Resident with Allied Headquarters, lived in considerable style. He asked Duff and Diana to many meals, but Diana felt he might have invited them to stay, he had no wife with him and four or five empty rooms. She still liked and admired him, however. Randolph Churchill, when he came to stay, said that he was going to run Macmillan as next Prime Minister: ‘Anything is better than Anthony. You must think so, darling.’ Diana did think so: ‘There’s more life and vision, less die in his wool, than there is in Donkey’s ears or Sir J. Anderson’s warts.’ He was her horse in the prime-ministerial stakes and she backed him loyally till he finally came home.
Gaston Palewski, ‘my old grinning, spotty friend’, now chef-de-cabinet to de Gaulle, met them on their arrival and was their principal ally among the French. Occasionally Diana found him too much of a good thing with his endless ‘O, la joie de vous avoir ici’, ‘la première femme civilisée’ and so on ad nauseam, but she appreciated his high spirits and his affection. He could do little to influence his intractable leader but at least his heart was in the right place and he would do all he could to ease Anglo-French relations. General Giraud, ‘a more wooden Kitchener of Khartoum’, would have liked to be friendly too, but he was so preoccupied by the crumbling of his position in face of an implacable de Gaulle that not much could be expected from him. De Lattre de Tassigny seemed to Diana the pick of the bunch, ‘spirit and wit, strength and fun’. Her personal favourite was probably d’Astier de la Vigerie, a ‘spellbinder and no mistake’, Diana called him, a romantic hero of the Resistance with whom every woman in Algiers was in love. She felt no similar enthusiasm for the worthy René Massigli, future French Ambassador in London, in spite of the fact that the local gossip had it that she was a grande amoureuse, sleeping regularly with Palewski, Massigli, and some third lover not yet identified.
De Gaulle, himself, was the reason for their being in Algiers. ‘Wormwood’, Diana called him. Before she met him she called on his wife and babbled on about her life in England. The word reached Wormwood: ‘Qu’avez vous fait de votre vache?’ he asked at their first meeting. When in doubt Diana always talked about her childhood, which lasted for a meal or two; but the thought of a procession of meals in Algiers and Paris beside this iceberg filled her with dismay. She cast around for new subjects and tried Australia: ‘Il paraît qu’il y a des kangarous,’ Wormwood observed gloomily. Fortunately for Diana, though sadly for Duff, de Gaulle was usually in such a rage with the Allies about their treatment of what he held to be the only legitimate French Government that social occasions were rare. Diana in fact sympathized with him. What she felt to be the persecution of the French seemed to her ill-judged and absurd. ‘I feel ashamed now to talk to the French about the situation, or would be if they were not all confident that Duff was doing his best for them whole-heartedly.’ Though she never learned to enjoy de Gaulle’s company, she equally never lost her romantic vision of him as liberator and superman. It was typical of her that, during the 14 July celebrations, even though due to meet him at tea, she insisted on joining the crowds and running after his car, cheering and clapping. ‘I like my celebrities seen through difficulties,’ she told Conrad, ‘and I like to run for them, not sit and speak with them.’
Her French was an added hazard in these relationships. Diana possessed a wide vocabulary but even less control of grammar than in English. Tenses and genders were a vexatious barrier to self-expression, to be knocked over if they could not conveniently be jumped. She had discovered the essential truth: that the French do not much care whether you speak their language correctly provided you speak it fluently. ‘It’s nerve and brass, audace and disrespect, and leaping-before-you-look and what-the-hellism, that must be developed.’ At first she ‘tutoyéd’ de Gaulle, because that was the only construction she had learnt in her nursery; her use of the wrong word sometimes caused embarrassment; yet she got by and the French loved it. Duff, with twice her control of the language, was stiff and tongue-tied, afraid of making a fool of himself. Half aghast and half admiring, he listened as Diana rattled on, and thus won for himself a reputation for stony taciturnity.
Shortly after their arrival the Coopers were summoned to Marrakesh where Churchill was recovering from pneumonia, for what was to be a critical confrontation between the Prime Minister and de Gaulle. The meeting went well and Churchill was in uproarious form. They talked about the future. Mrs Churchill was tranquilly concerned that her husband would not long survive the war. ‘You see, he’s seventy and I’m sixty,’ she said, ‘and we’re putting all we have into this war, and it will take all we have.’ Diana was moved but unconvinced. She believed that the only thing that would kill Churchill off before extreme old age was some lethal disease. ‘He is too interested in other things. The peace will absorb him while he’s part of it, and he’ll be fighting like a champion to get back to the helm if he loses it.’
The party went on an elaborate picnic in the hills about eighty miles from Marrakesh. Churchill was settled on a long chair and fed a succession of brandies, each one accompanied by an elaborate charade of consulting his doctor, Lord Moran, first. Churchill insisted on pounding down a steep slope, then staunchly confronted the climb back. Diana seized a table-cloth and looped it behind him, and a group of men towed him puffing to the top, with Lord Moran walking behind carrying the great man’s cigar and at intervals taking his pulse. Mercifully, Churchill took an interest in their sad plight in Algiers, and a stream of peremptory telegrams went off, insisting that the British Representative must be better housed and served.
From then on things began to mend. China, silver and glass arrived in large quantities; linen too, floridly marked ‘Empire Hotel, Bath’. Lord Portal was enlisted to bring a four-branched candlestick, Sergeant-Major Bright scrounged a new boiler, Diana ‘borrowed’ blue paint from the military stores. Rifleman Sweeny, formerly from the household of Lord Gretton, lent tone to the establishment. He remembers above all the unexpectedness of Diana. She was always having new ideas, goats in the dining-room, meals in the garden. You never knew where you were, but could be sure at least that life would not be dull.
For almost the only time in her life, Diana had started off in Algiers by being bored. She moped for hours on her bed, slept late and went to bed early. ‘In any other place I have been – Geneva, Singapore, New York, Midwest towns – I always found something: learning the language, exercises for the hips, riding. Here nothing that I can find makes sense.’ Then abruptly she pulled herself together. The villa began to function properly. Guests flocked in. The Embassy, as it was usually known, became a place to which people competed to go. The official French welcomed invitations, the unofficial too. André Gide came to lunch. ‘I expected an old Frog in a skull cap and velvet collar covered with scurf; instead I found a very clean, bald, gentlemanlike man dressed in a good brown tweed suit with brown shoes and spats. His only eccentricity was when he saw there was a fire in the dining-room and exclaimed, “Ah, je vais ôter mon sweater”, which he retired to the hall and did.’ Martha Gellhorn was called in to entertain him and ‘swept the old sod off his feet’; indeed he enjoyed himself so much that he refused to leave until Miss Gellhorn was on her way.
English friends came thick and fast. Victor Rothschild arrived; ‘On no account unpack his Lordship’s bag,’ Duff warned Sweeny. ‘It’s full of bombs.’ Randolph Churchill and Evelyn Waugh were frequent guests, spitting venom amiably at each other. Churchill later had a non-malignant tumour removed. ‘What a triumph of modern science,’ commented Waugh, ‘to find the only part of Randolph that is not malignant and remove it.’ Evelyn Waugh haunted the house, slumped in black misery alleviated only by sudden rages. Diana asked what was wrong. Nothing, said Waugh in surprise; he was rich, he was successful, he loved his wife and children. Then could he not look a little happier? Waugh was struck by the suggestion, wh
ich people, he said, had sometimes made before, but did little to act on it. Randolph Churchill arrived to nurse his injuries after the aircrash in which he and Evelyn Waugh had come close to being killed in Yugoslavia. He seemed to settle in almost permanently and proved a wearing guest:
Randolph chain-drinks from noon on, it’s quite alarming. He does not seem to get any tighter. I should think he must go through two bottles of gin a day. I wouldn’t mind if only he were better house-trained. He staggers into my room at about 9.30 and orders his breakfast. His coughing is like some huge dredger that brings up dreadful sea-changed things. He spews them out into his hand or into the vague – as soon as I get up he takes my place in my bed with his dirt-encrusted feet and cigarette ash and butts piling up around him. He is cruelly bored and leaves his mouth open to yawn.
Another constant visitor was Bloggs Baldwin, second son of the former Prime Minister, who attached himself to Diana as a cross between aide-de-camp, lover and court jester. Turnip-white-faced, ginger-haired, heavily bespectacled, ill-at-ease in society, he was not a glamorous figure; but he was a true original, uproariously funny when relaxed with a few close friends, with a streak of poetry and a sense of beauty. He was a perfect companion for Diana when Duff was preoccupied by business; as ready for adventure as she was, as unconcerned about decorum or discomfort. Devoted to his wife and son in England, he was forlorn and lonely in North Africa and found in the Coopers’ house a home where he could feel appreciated and at ease. ‘We go and picnic and read Browning,’ Diana told her sister Marjorie, ‘and talk interminably about our childhood and our families.’ Diana approached the Secretary of State for Air, Archibald Sinclair, and suggested Bloggs Baldwin should be promoted. Not surprisingly her proposal met with no success.
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