Autobiography Read online

  All Venice was shocked by these frolics, not unnaturally, I suppose, and I came in for most of the blame, but there was no remorse in the House of Feasting and we all vowed to return yearly. The war was too near when the vow was made. In fact this was the Carne Vale of 1913. Only Duff and I ever did return.

  It had been a very gay year. I was enjoying life more than ever before. Lit by the common day I all but forgot the prison shades:

  God of Battles, Patrick, those three vampire months in London. How far from the Brahms level† I sank, to what depths of dance-love, dewdrop-slavery and crowned-head worship did I fall. Lord, it was a primrose path of dalliance. I never mean to forget my first “intoxicating year”…. Swimming in cool river pools with Grenfell gods and another young god, Alfred Lyttelton, who dropped his years with his clothes … Olympic zeal in his face, and that dancing star Alphy Clary with equally starry teeth—foot and mouth perfection.

  A lot of letters were written in those leisured days. They were my daily bread when exiled at Belvoir. The evidence is in my big tin boxes that hold these treasures of youth. Duff writes:

  I think it would be rather fun if you were to write one letter to every ten of mine. You would then probably receive ten a day, which would begin to crowd uncomfortably a small house like Belvoir, and lay up a lifetime’s occupation for some remote descendant of the young Marquess with a similar taste for antiquarian research. Perhaps he would publish Letters from the celebrated Mr Duff Cooper to a Lady Diana Manners, 3rd daughter of the 8th Duke etc. in 10 vols, and I hope copiously illustrated.

  One can see from the following snippet how Duff’s life did not help to recommend him to ambitious mothers:

  A hasty moment snatched from a busy feverish day. Interviewing bankers at breakfast time, having lost £500 at the tables overnight. Oh! if only I had won as much, I would have bought you something so pretty but now I shan’t, in fact I doubt whether I shall put a stamp on this. It is hard to lose at cards and at love, and very expensive in gold and tears, but bankers are delicious people and help one so cleverly to consume one’s capital, and mine are particularly charming. They always ask me how Lord Farquhar is, and as I have only met him once in my life I always answer that he was looking very well when I last saw him, which makes them very happy and they immediately do everything I ask. How are you looking?

  And again money seems to be a difficulty. We played too high. One morning Duff sent me a little bag of golden sovereigns, the normal currency before the first war:

  Didn’t you say at dinner that you wanted £160 and didn’t I say that you should have it? Perhaps you have forgotten, but if you said it, it is true, and it is terrible that you should ever want anything, especially anything that I can give you, but it is heavenly that you should want it at one of the rare moments when I should have it….

  I am weak and weaponless before you and say as Charles II said of the Prince of Denmark “I have tried you drunk and I have tried you sober, and there is nothing in you”—nothing that I don’t adore. How right and wise you were to quit a little commoner, a little little commoner, an obscure commoner, for a well-known and notorious Duke.

  This must refer to “Bendor,” the magnificent Duke of Westminster, who dazzled me for a few weeks of 1913.

  *

  We had become an even closer Coterie, very irritating to others and utterly satisfying and delightful to ourselves. There was a hard core and its shifting outer rings. There was Gustav Hamel, the young pioneer, a gold-haired, intrepid Swede. He belonged to our “ring.” He was a lot with us, dining at odd restaurants (a new excitement for me and allowed only if chaperoned) and motoring with great danger in his racing car at night, and dancing, and for all but me there were flights in his mothy aeroplane. My mother forbade me to fly and it was a humiliation deeply resented. Lady Dudley looped the loop. Sybil, Duff’s sister, took up two piglets to prove that pigs could fly. Duff flew from place to place as a means of transport. All the girls were leaves in the wind. Then one tragic day Hamel was flying back from Hardelot in France to London. A crowd was on the airfield to welcome and cheer him, but he never returned. London was struck with horror. Newsboys screamed rumoured reports of his safety. Friends, unable to bear the suspense, quickly took ship to Hardelot in some hope of hearing good news. Dances were abandoned. Hamel was never seen again. I was hysterically upset, more really than my affection for him warranted, and Duff wrote me a poem of grief and another about Hamel’s loss for The Times. It was the first violent death of a young man in my life, but within a few weeks there was to be another.

  The Russian Ambassador, Count Benckendorff, had the happiest Embassy in London. His son Constantine and Edward Horner arranged a party on the Thames one July night. The guests were Claud Russell, Katharine and Raymond Asquith, Duff and his sister Sybil, Iris Tree, a lovely Swiss girl called Jacqueline de Portalès, myself and Denis Anson. A little ship had been moored to the Westminster Bridge steps, a supper laid, and a quartet from Thomas Beecham’s orchestra was already on board when my mother unwillingly took me to the embarkation. Venetia Stanley and Maurice Baring were on the jetty havering. The evening was not perfect. Drizzle threatened. Denis arrived and was swinging in the rigging before we started. Whether some premonition urged Maurice to abandon us I do not know, but he and Venetia went home with my mother and orders from me to assure her that all was beautiful and Charles II in feeling—Water Music, Youth at the Prow, Pleasure at the Helm. We had talked of bathing-dresses but had not brought them—enough with supper, the Thames, music and ourselves. We glided away, the sun set, we feasted and the musicians played us into serenity on deck.

  Who suggested bathing? I cannot tell. It may, it may have been me. I have so prayed it was not and now I do not know. Anyhow no one was keener or more pleased at the project than I was. Denis the intrepid, Denis the steeplejack, strong as a stag, will surely be the first in! He was. It seems odd now that none of the older ones should have cautioned. It may have been too quick and too dark, they may have been half-dreaming to the music. Before he jumped he gave me his watch and chain. We could see his head in the trail of mirrored light from the further shore. For a moment I lost sight of it and screamed my fears to the one I was with. “You always fear the worst,” “Of course I can still see him,” “He’s a strong unsinkable swimmer.” The ship’s captain, knowing the cruel Thames so much better than we did, stopped the ship as fast as he could, but already we were far beyond the place where Denis had dived in. The realisation came when a member of the quartet jumped into the river as a rescuer. In another moment Constantine was also overboard. Then it was our turn to hold on with all our physical might to the other men who were throwing off their coats and trying to be rid of our restraining arms. In a few moments a little craft had come alongside and men were dragging Constantine, utterly exhausted, into their boat. The tide had the strength of a bore. Light was breaking and showing me the hideous scene. No one looked like themselves. Water had drained from their faces and left them like painted corpses in bright shrouds.

  The police had arrived and were telling of the tide and the idiocy of our action and of the certainty that both men would drown. They were taking our names too and our evidence. The sun was up. Time had no bearing on anything. The sanguine felt sure that the divers had swum to shore and that we should find Denis at his flat. We drifted up and down calling and searching. At last Youth (the music over) left the Prow and our distraught group landed on the steps of Westminster, dripping and haggard, where a few hours before we had danced aboard.

  At Denis’s flat the old housemaid knew nothing of his return. His bed had not been slept in. Edward and Constantine went to break the fearful news to the missing men’s families. I was frightened to go home and the lovely Swiss Jacqueline offered to stay the night with me. My mother never shut her door. She must, asleep or awake, know the comings and goings in the house. Never till she died did I not look in on my way to bed, whatever the hour. This early morning’s call was the worst I ev
er had to make.

  The next few days were memorably terrible. Mad youth was blamed for the death of this fine young man. I seemed to get the brunt from the Anson family and from all elders. When at last the inquest was called, Denis’s family engaged a very eminent lawyer (one wonders what to prove) and, not to be outdone, F. E. Smith, in whose chambers Edward Horner was working, volunteered to appear for us. My mother, in spite of my arguments and assurances of the futility of an appeal, called on the coroner, with the result that at the inquest I was not made a witness. It was a dreadful story. The young musician was consumptive and was due to die. The Great War was upon us and Denis would surely have been the first to be killed, but with all my resilience this was a gruesome soul-shattering end to the carefree life I knew.

  I was held guiltiest as being the most conspicuous. The travesties of truth told against me stimulated me to ideas of retaliation, but now it was July, and August 1914 was very near.

  * The first stanza of the sonnet in chapter XXVI of Dante’s Vita Nuova, translated by D. G. Rossetti as:

  My lady looks so gentle and so pure

  When yielding salutation by the way,

  That the tongue trembles and has nought to say,

  And the eyes, which fain would see, may not endure.

  † A private language phrase indicating the highest excellence.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Nurse Manners

  WE were staying with the Trees at Robertsbridge—many too many of us for the beds. Herbert and Maud Tree were there, presiding over abundance of food and fun. I remember we disrespectfully “loaded” their cocktails, thinking to make them more lenient to our strange midsummer night’s dream. There were a hammock and some deck-chairs, but not enough for all, so we settled for no rest till sunlight and danced and feasted the night through, and at dawn took cars to Battle Abbey and breakfasted at Bodiam Castle, returning with the papers which carried the news of the assassinations at Sarajevo. It meant very little to our sleepy consciousness. War had of course been talked about by the so-called alarmists of the day, with stories of Der Tag and the wicked Kaiser, but this poor murdered couple seemed to us unlinked with our country or ourselves, and yet Sir Herbert that Sunday morning was plunged in apprehension and gloom and prophecies of war. We fell upon the hard daisied grass and slept the sleep of happy ignorance.

  So, on August 4, war was declared. We were at The Woodhouse, Rowsley, playing the war game, then very much the fashion, elaborated by Winston Churchill into a pastime for strategists and involving hundreds of tin soldiers. As my brother, Bunt Goschen and our adored Ego Charteris lay on their stomachs in a stone courtyard lining up their army corps, they quarrelled more hotly over the campaigns and planning of battles than summit generals were ever to quarrel over war itself. From the day of declaration my fearful vision saw it all as it was to be, but a lot of older people thought or it as another Boer War and said, “It’ll take a week or two to roll ’em up.”

  One of the young men returning to England on August 8 wrote to me from the train:

  About affairs—I won’t discuss the military situation, nor the diplomatic, nor even the financial, which is exciting beyond words: but I want to lay my position before you as a psychologist and a sometimes inspired counsellor. Shall I go up against Ramoth Gilead and prosper? Look now: I am the most unmilitary of men. I hated field-days at Eton. I hate the very thought of taking the field now: I do not particularly dislike the Germans; my chief European preoccupation is the ultimate hegemony of the Russians, which it seems to me we are fighting to achieve: and I know full well that though I may be a bad banker I should be a hundred times a worse soldier. Again, I frankly recoil from the thought of wounds and death.

  These things being so, ought I to go? When I say to myself that I am doing more useful work in the city, do I mean that I am earning a better salary, and that I should be ruining my chances if I went, as well as imperilling my most precious life? Honestly I don’t know. Meanwhile I seem to myself to have temporarily solved the problem by proposing to enrol myself in the London Volunteer Defence Force (for business men to drill in their leisure moments), after a month or two of which I shall:

  (a) be moderately efficient.

  (b) have thoroughly introspected my position.

  (c) have some chance of seeing whether this is a war crying for every able-bodied young man, or simply a war for the suitable with others in reserve.

  One might also perhaps attend to one’s French and German, and have an eye to a possible vacancy in the interpreterships. But God knows—and I beg of you to communicate anything you have been able to glean of His purposes.

  I feel myself excused from entering upon your peace-letter to E., it not having been written to me. I saw very unexpectedly your mother last night. She was very sweet and alarmist. Are you always at Rowsley now? Or where else?

  Three weeks later he was in France. This letter I put in to show that realisation of what the war meant seeped in very slowly. (In 1939 we knew it would be worse than it was, hence the wringing of hands six years before the bells.)

  August 1914

  The atmosphere here is appalling. The crisis has brought out all that is best in British womanhood. K. still keeps her head but C. and her Ladyship have sunk all their political differences and are facing the enemy as one man. They have cornered all the petrol, sold all Charles Kinsky’s hunters, knocked off two courses at dinner and turned my child’s pony-cart into an ambulance. How I wish you were at the War Office—Diana instead of Kitchener. We should all sleep easy in our beds, or I for one should make a bee-line for the colours….

  Certainly in London the fog of war, as they call it, had got into everybody’s lungs and the air was thick with the feeling that England expects everyone to make a fuss, and that if you did make a fuss—even quite a small fuss, for at a time like this no fuss is too small—you would be personally thanked by the Prince of Wales. I saw at once there were two things to be done:

  (1) to make some small unobtrusive fuss of my own.

  (2) to interfere as much as possible with the people who were making more serious fusses.

  So I put my name down for a thing called the London Volunteer Defence Force organised by Lovat and Desborough, having the following among other advantages:

  (a) It is not yet in existence.

  (b) The War Office may stop it ever coming into existence.

  (c) P. belongs to it.

  (d) No member of it can be called upon to perform even the simplest act of duty for several months.

  (e) No member of it can possibly be killed till Goodwood 1915 at earliest.

  Then I went to the most amusing place called the National Service League offices, where a vast swarm of well-meaning and inefficient patriots are employed for fourteen hours a day in first classifying and then rejecting the applications of a still vaster swarm of still more well-meaning and inefficient patriots for posts which they are obviously incapable of filling—Baptist Ministers who volunteer as vivandières and so forth. I spent a very pleasant afternoon trying to put these people into classes. There were four classes, but the qualifications for each class were so peculiar that none of the 2000 applicants whom I examined were eligible for any one of the four. Next week the committee are going to alter the classification, and it is hoped that someone may scrape into one of the classes. It will be a proud day for England when this happens.

  As to hopes and fears…. There is in the Regular Army John Manners:* “Let determined things to destiny hold unbewailed their way,”† but if the Yeomanry begin fighting our hearts will be horribly wrung. And why do I say “if”? It’s a certainty, I fear. If that wretched old K. of Chaos had only been able to carry out his scheme for a Second Army! But it was always hopeless and now he has definitely climbed down and taken shelter behind Jack Tennant;‡ and two Divisions of Territorials are to go abroad first. However if the war is really going to last three years (as K. says) we shall all be under the sod, and as well sooner as later.
Poor old Edward went off to the North Somersets last week with Cicely’s two best hunters and a body-servant and Mrs. B. But all these conveniences have now been confiscated for the use of the Regiment, and old E. sleeps on bare boards, rises at 5 a.m. and guards bridges in Surrey. It makes one’s heart bleed.

  We all dispersed—my brother to the Derbyshire Territorials, Ego to the Gloucestershire Yeomanry. I was left to comfort my weeping mother who was losing her only son, to toss around some late Midland hay, and to think of schemes to stop the war.

  I have found my Peace Letter, written to Edward Horner on 7 August 1914:

  Edward darling, I think it’s up to the Coterie to stop this war. What a justification! My scheme is simple enough to be carried out by you at once. It consists of getting a neutral country, either America or Spain or Italy or any other you can think of, to ask each fighting country to pledge their word—on condition each one’s word is given—to cease hostilities, or rather suspend them totally until a treaty or conference is made. That they should then meet, agreed not to dissolve until a decision of Peace is come to, and not a collection of worm-eaten Ambassadors to do this but the Edward Greys of each country. It seems to me an admirable suggestion. For God’s sake see to it, backed by Patrick and the P.M. How splendid it would be. “Who stopped the war?” “Oh, haven’t you heard, Edward and Diana, members of that Corrupt Coterie.” You mightn’t believe it, but this is written more seriously than I’ve ever written. My fears are your own war lust. Perhaps Maurice [Baring] would be a better man to put it to a neutral country’s Head—that’s all that’s wanted. Then a few hours with the cable. Do see to it. God, if I were only Judith or Jael or Salammbô or Corday or Monna Vanna—or at worst the crazy Kaiser’s mistress.