Autobiography Read online

  DIANA COOPER

  Autobiography

  The Rainbow Comes and Goes

  The Light of Common Day

  Trumpets from the Steep

  The Rainbow comes and goes,

  And lovely is the Rose …

  At length the Man perceives it die away,

  And fade into the light of common day …

  The Cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,

  No more shall grief of mine the season wrong …

  WORDSWORTH

  Ode (Intimations of Immortality from

  Recollections of Early Childhood)

  “Behold the Child”

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Frontispiece

  Illustrations

  THE RAINBOW COMES AND GOES

  1. No Shadows

  2. The Castle on the Hill

  3. Shades of the Prison-House

  4. Brave New World

  5. The Coterie

  6. Pleasure at the Helm

  7. Nurse Manners

  8. Frustration and Folly

  9. Dances of Death

  10. The Glory and the Dream

  11. The Happy Altar

  12. The Plan

  THE LIGHT OF COMMON DAY

  1. The Miracle

  2. Dolls in Exile

  3. The Reinhardt Circus

  4. St George and the Dragons

  5. Politics and Parties

  6. The Gothic Farmer

  7. Pride of Boot

  8. The Fort and the Cruise

  9. The Price of Admiralty

  10. The Fog of Peace

  11. Enchantress in the Baltic

  12. Days of Dread

  TRUMPETS FORM THE STEEP

  1. Talking Through Armageddon

  2. The Last-Trump Capital

  3. The Good Earth

  4. Fiery Portal of the East

  5. A Long Way Home

  6. Back to the Land

  7. The Giraffe and the Duckling

  8. Winter and Journey’s End

  Index

  Plates

  Copyright

  Illustrations

  “Behold the Child”

  Marjorie teaching me to read at Hatley

  My mother and Marjorie in the Hatley drawing-room

  My mother, John, Haddon and Marjorie

  My father

  My brother Haddon

  Detail of his monument by my mother

  Belvoir

  Queen Victoria’s drawing of my mother, Balmoral 1877

  Marjorie resting from sitting to Jacques-Emile Blanche

  Felix Youssupoff in the Eglinton Tournament

  Raymond Asquith

  Edward Horner

  Letty’s children were my pages

  The Nun

  Jo Davidson at work

  The Miracle-Makers: Reinhardt, Kommer, Kahn, Gest

  Raimund von Hofmannsthal

  With Iris in Arizona

  Gower Street: the drawing-room, showing Rex Whistler’s trompe l’oeil

  Conrad Russell sewing his cheeses

  The dolphins

  John Julius

  Reading aloud

  Maurice Baring and Dempsey

  The Princess and the Dairymaid (Cecil Beaton)

  The refugees: Kaetchen, John Julius and Nanny Ayto

  Rex Whistler

  Two drawings by Rex Whistler

  Bognor after lunch (Cecil Beaton)

  The pigs (Cecil Beaton)

  Duff and his staff, Singapore

  Paris, 11 November 1944

  Pauline Borghese’s bed (Cecil Beaton)

  Cecil Beaton in the library (Cecil Beaton)

  My idea of Tiepolo’s idea of Cleopatra (Cecil Beaton)

  Anne and Artemis

  The Rainbow Comes and Goes

  CHAPTER ONE

  No Shadows

  THE celestial light shone most brightly at Cockayne Hatley, a house in Bedfordshire that must always be remembered as the place where the clouds cast no shadows but were always fleecy white, where grass was greener and taller, strawberries bigger and more plentiful, and above all where garden and woods, the house and the family, the servants and villagers, would never change. It was a rather ugly house, verandahed and ivied, which my father had taken, not as I thought for eternity but for perhaps ten years, to house his family of two sons and three daughters. We had grown too big for our London house, 23a Bruton Street, where I was born. (It still stands, unrecognisable with its discreet front door replaced by blatant shop-windows. Not long ago, walking home after dinner in Hill Street, I followed a fire-engine for the first time in my life. It led me to the house of my birth burning brightly, and in the crowd I came shoulder to shoulder with my brother.)

  Hatley was an unpretentious house and my mother, I think, did nothing much to improve it. There were assegais in the hall and a gong to say that meals were ready, and a dark dining-room with the Marly horses in black bronze on the chimney-piece. It was a room into which I scarcely went except to say good morning to my father eating his breakfast alone, and to be given a minute tidbit of his roll spread with butter and marmalade, and on “occasions” such as snapdragon at Christmas or when my father showed his magic lantern. Two or three times a year the children and household were given this double treat of magic and contretemps—the burnt finger, the appalling smell of multiple substances burning, the upside-down pictures, the reliable sameness of the slides. These never changed, any more than did the servants, who must have wearied of the programme. All fathers of the nineties had magic lanterns and slides of the Zoo and the Houses of Parliament and Niagara, but we thought ourselves unique and superior by having one—only one—of Father himself and my eldest sister Marjorie, taken in Scotland, with a background of moors.

  The drawing-room had a palm and a draped grand piano and three big windows, whose blue curtains were seldom hung in the summer, as they had to be laid out on the lawn to get their inartistic brightness faded by the eternal Hatley sunshine. There were screens and faded red chintz-covered sofas and down-at-castor chairs and an ottoman, and pictures of Cust ancestors and children (the house was owned by Lord Brownlow). There were white fur rugs in profusion, my mother’s touch and a happy one, for children to roll upon, with a more interesting smell than the common knee-excoriating carpet. There was a little room, used only for the Christmas tree, and there was my father’s study, well lined with books and giving on to the garden, into which jutted a glass palm-filled bubble. Today we can admire a Victorian conservatory, but my Pre-Raphaelite mother would have none of it.

  Upstairs the house wandered without sense through passages and baize swing-doors, different levels and wings, with no symmetry or plan but to my child’s reason the true design. There was the schoolroom wing and the nurseries. The schoolroom was ruled by Deborah Metzker, a squat, flat-slippered, manly woman, severe and orderly, with no give, few smiles and no caresses, but “Debby” was loved by Marjorie and our brothers Haddon and John. When I was three they were respectively fourteen, eleven and nine. There was an age-bar that allowed us to mix only very occasionally, although the next child, my sister Letty, was already seven. Sometimes the nursery would visit the schoolroom and be impressed by its age and intelligence, its aviary of canaries and bullfinches and its many pugs, the only breed of dog considered “safe with children.” Sitting there one day at tea, high in my mother’s arms, I remember looking down on the sad fair face of my brother Haddon. Soon after he was to die and cause my mother such an anguish of grief that she withdrew into a studio in London, where in her dreadful pain she was able to sculpt a recumbent figure of her dead son. Cut in marble it now lies in the chapel at Haddon Hall, and the plaster cast, which
I think more beautiful as being the work of her own hand, is in the Tate Gallery. All her artistic soul went into this tomb, and critics of fifty years later, their vision, values and perspective deformed or reformed by Henry Moore, have bowed to the truth and beauty of what she created. My mother did not live to mourn the death of her other children. She used to tell me at eighty how the thought of this dead child could hurt her as keenly as ever, but that the thought grew ever rarer.

  The schoolroom visited the nursery only when they were dressed as musketeers or Romans or clowns and were desperate for an audience. The nursery did not have pets. It had Nanny, who was all and everything. She looked like a little dried-up monkey. I thought her most lovely. Her eyes were blue and almost met, the pink of her cheeks was broken veins; her hair she dealt with once a week with a sponge and some dark liquid in a saucer which resulted in an unsuccessful brown-black; her teeth were long by nature, her body a mummy’s bones. She took her bath every morning behind the nursery screen on which Walter Crane’s Sleeping Beauty, Yellow Dwarf, Beauty and the Beast, etc. were pasted. I was given a Marie biscuit to allay my curiosity and never did I peer through the screen chinks. Nanny always wore black, winter and summer—a bodice and skirt made of “stuff.” On her head she wore for the Park a minute black bonnet that just covered the top of her dear head, moored down with strong black velvet ribbons tied beneath her chin. I loved her dearly, because I was an affectionate, incurious, unenquiring child, so that it seemed only natural that I should not be allowed to take a toy in my perambulator to the Park, or my doll to the garden, and that Nanny would never cuddle or comfort me. Nor did she ever play with me. She sat always at the plain deal nursery table mending our clothes and darning her own stockings on an egg.

  It was a leisured life. I do not think that Nanny did the children’s washing (the laundrymaid saw to that), and she had a nurserymaid to lay the table and dust and make our beds and dress my sister Letty and push the perambulator when in London. Strapped into my navy-blue pram, a crescent balanced on sensitive springs, a wide moufflon cape leaving nothing exposed but my white woollen hands, coifed in a so-called “Dutch” bonnet tied like Nanny’s under the chin, I would be wheeled, long-haired tam-o’-shantered sister Letty walking alongside, to the Nannies’ fashion centre, Rotten Row, where Nanny would meet Nanny Benson and Nanny Poynder to talk of their charges in dark undertones, spelling out the flattering p-r-e-t-t-y, or the ominous d-e-n-t-i-s-t, or to discuss disloyally the “enamelled” Princess of Wales or my Nanny’s unreasonable dislike of the Duke of York. We wheeled along Rotten Row and ladies and gentlemen on tall horses would stop and ask whose children we were. Later, when I was always dressed in black satin, more riders stopped. I was taken out of the pram for leg-stretching, but no romping was allowed. The grass was too dirty, hoops too dangerous, so I walked demurely with Letty and Daisy Benson talking of Christmas and birthdays. On muddy days the one-legged crossing-sweeper always got a penny for the channel he had cleaned, and would grin and touch his cap, passing the time of day with Nanny, whom he called “Mrs Whatmore.” My aunts called her “Whatmore.” Mother said “Nanny” and the aunts thought this as wrong as saying “Cook” or “your master.” I realised life’s monotony and accepted it as one of the natural laws, but it was a great delight to go out, as I sometimes did, with my mother in a hansom cab, even though she did once drop me on the pavement when stepping out on that precarious little foothold—an event that I do not remember but heard tell of a hundred times.

  And so back to dinner at one o’clock. I was the baby and in consequence Nanny’s special charge and favourite. As I sat perched high in my baby’s chair, strapped in with a tray for my food that, attached to the chair, came whirling over my head and imprisoned me safely, Nanny would feed me bread and milk, teach me to use my right hand, give me a crust to suck and later a chicken drumstick to gnaw—a bone I see to this day as the symbol of the soul. On my feeder in red cross-stitch was written “Don’t be dainty” and I wasn’t, but poor Letty, like so many children, while not dainty, could not swallow her food. Round and round it went in her mouth, colder and more congealed grew the mutton-fat, further away receded the promising pudding, and very often I saw her unfinished plate put cold into the cupboard for tea. Nanny, typical of her date and dryness, trained us by punishment only, never by reasoning and persuasion. I was so rarely naughty that I came in for very little chastisement: occasionally a “bed for the rest of the day” like life-sentences that never finish their term, so that by teatime I was picked up and given a treat—a paintbox perhaps with magazine pictures to colour and instructions not to lick my brush like grown-ups, who if they licked green paint, known to be arsenic, would surely die. But Letty, although a good child too, got boxed on the ears and, cruellest and most humiliating, a “dose” as a punishment. What seemed dreadful favouritism may have been due to our difference in age. Letty was given rhubarb, an obnoxious yellow powder to be taken in water, milk or jam (Letty chose jam through her tears), while I had a glass of cheerful tinkling citrate of magnesia. I used to cry for Letty’s tears and occasionally bought her a reprieve.

  Letty was my be-all, my dayspring, my elder, my accomplice. Hers was the invention. I do not remember having any myself. Hers was the daily “strip” whispered from her bed to mine in darkness—long sagas, no fairy stuff, more family life with my aunts and grandmother or the Dan Leno family, a sort of normal background of home with quite dreadful happenings and tortures predominating. Then Letty could draw well, and Letty rode side-saddle on Cobweb, and Marjorie galloped on Trilby, while I sat in a padded worked chair-saddle, like a howdah, on Shetland. Letty was graceful, I was a blunderbuss. Letty picked up a lot and brought the news to the nursery—tremendous news—that Aunt Kitty had not died of a chill but had drowned herself in the lake at Belvoir, that she had seen our mother sobbing, and that Nanny, said to be on her holiday, was never to return. In argument Letty would gain the point by reminding me that she was four and a half years older, but I thought of us as twins with her as the clever one. She said older prayers—“Our Fathers”—at Nanny’s bath-aproned knee while I, my face glowing from the fire and glistening with lanoline, mumbled “Please God bless Papa and Mama” and “Gentle Jesus meek and mild.”

  Nanny taught me my letters on building-blocks and taught me to read without tears by the ripe age of four. I learnt that E was like a little carriage with a little seat for the driver, that G looked like a monkey eating a cake, and later that the pig was in the gig and how ten men met in a den. By five or six I was on to Line upon Line and Lines Left Out, which dealt unexpectedly enough with Abraham and Lot’s wife. The first book I read to myself was Stumps, which on finishing I began again. I resolved to do this for ever. The next was Little Christian’s Pilgrim’s Progress, as a serial story in a bound copy of Sunday. I knew Pliable and Obstinate and Faithful (I don’t suppose that Carnal Cogitation figured) as I knew ordinary surnames—Nixon the butler, or Searle or Durrance. They carried no allegorical sense any more than Marderveen, in its fluted pyramidal bottle sealed in scarlet, meant Pommade Divine, sovereign for bumps. I learnt my tables (early ones), and strokes and pothooks came easily, I imagine, since I remember making and enjoying them. Nanny sat and I stood by her side reading aloud, as I followed her guiding pencil, from Little Arthur’s England.

  I knew a lot of poems by heart, but never funny ones. My mother did not mind nursery rhymes. She liked only the beautiful in everything. Tolerant of toys, she was unsympathetic to any that were conventional or comic. Japanese dolls and Japanese crinkly-paper books were encouraged. She abhorred anything in the fashionable golliwog style. I am not capable of describing the extraordinary beauty and flavour that emanated from my mother. She had ethereal iridescence, passionate but not over-demonstrative love for her children, and a certain mysterious detachment. I never knew her tired or sad or very gay. Crossness was out of her ken. She would rock me and I would press my face into her cream (never white) silks and laces, and shut my eyes
to smell more clearly the faint orris-root that scented them. I hope that as this story moves on she will here and there be seen as she was, but it is too much to expect.

  When I was about six the world-shattering news that Hatley was to be sold overwhelmed us all. Shades of the prison-house had begun to close very early for me. I knew that “things didn’t last for ever,” that Nanny had once been a child and would die. Already at five I would tell myself that I too was to be a victim of death. I would say “You are only a child. It is too far ahead to think of.” I suppose that subconsciously it was my brother’s death that had instructed me, although I do not remember the happening, nor my mother’s misery, nor talk among servants and villagers, but there it was, I knew that we were moving on, and superimposed on this little shadow of instability came a black thundering ejecting cloud. Hatley and Bruton Street were to be sold, and a new house bought in London. It was to be goodbye to the known world. A fig for Bruton Street! but Hatley …

  The grown-ups too were very sad (in itself disconcerting)—Nanny and Debby and Miss Tritton, and Rose the nurserymaid and the gardeners who were to watch us go, and the groom who was to go but not with us, and Miss Laxton and her old mother in the house across the field, and the clergyman and the washerwoman, and the Peels, the only neighbours. All seemed to be part of this tragedy. Goodbye to the tall grass and the hay, the pond with the island and the little boat, and the frogs in the gruesome pit that pyramided themselves until they toppled over, to the garden and the sun-hot fruit on the kitchen-garden walls. What would go with us? What would be jettisoned? Was the toy-cupboard going as it stood? Yes—a relief but not enough. Funnily, though, I do not remember the last day. I suppose that it was benignantly camouflaged. Shetland went to Belvoir, so did the carriage-horse Svengali. The pugs and canaries came to London, and the excitement of the huge house boasting of electric light and two bathrooms swept us into a new world that dazzled our eyes, putting the past into a shade that now has become the nostalgic fountain-light of being.