The outbreak of the First World War had found Diana excited, exhilarated even; mildly irritated at the disruption of her social life; confident that all would be over in a few months before any of her dearest friends ran serious risk in battle. It was some time before she realized the enormity of the catastrophe that was overtaking her world. September 1939, in contrast, found her in black despair, convinced that London would shortly be destroyed by bombardment, its people choked by gases, famine and disease rampant among those who survived. It was some time before she realized that nothing of the sort was going on; that things, in fact, were remarkably unchanged.
By the time the phoniness of the phoney war had become apparent, she was, indeed, already far away. Duff had long been pledged to go to the United States in October 1939 on a lecture tour. When war came he hoped for employment, but though Churchill, now back in the Cabinet, muttered that all would be well, it did not seem as if anything was in the offing. In America he would make some money and have a chance to put Britain’s case. Chamberlain was grudgingly acquiescent, sending his private secretary to Duff the night before he departed with the almost incredible instruction that, during his tour, he was to avoid saying anything that might smack of propaganda for the Allied cause. To this Duff resolved to pay no attention.
Duff and Diana left Southampton on 12 October. Preparations had been chaotic, largely thanks to the ministrations of a lunatic butler who packed for Duff as for the Hunting of the Snark. There were fifteen small valises, half of them empty and the other half packed for single one-legged men. Each contained a suit and collar, one shoe, the top of a pair of pyjamas or the bottom, one handkerchief and a sock. ‘It is too peculiar,’ said Diana sadly. Photographers swarmed around the ship but she pleaded with them not to photograph the former minister in case the Germans assigned a special submarine for his destruction. Her precautions did not comfort one gloomy fellow-passenger who had been a survivor of the Lusitania and now announced that she would have cancelled her passage if she had suspected so obvious a target would be on board. Diana’s own spirits remained high. ‘I feel that this is the first time I have been part of real life,’ she told Conrad. ‘I was going to say “except when John Julius was born” but even that wasn’t very real. Artifice, science and drugs veiled the reality.’
Her cheerfulness did not long survive arrival in New York. Ill health, reaction from former excitement, guilt at leaving Britain at a time of crisis, a bout of irrational melancholia, all contributed to her determination to view everything with a jaundiced eye. She was staying with the Paleys, rich, intelligent, successful. He was President of the Columbia Broadcasting System and she found him ‘very, very attractive. 100% Jew but looking more like good news from Tartary’ – everything she most liked in men. Yet the luxury was too stifling, the taste too exquisite, the wit too sophisticated and sterile. People rarely seemed to read and never to write. When Duff said he must write some letters, ‘the footman was asked to find all the necessities, as if one had asked to make toffee on a wet afternoon’. Diana knew that she was being carping and ungrateful, but she could not feel content.
The Coopers were feted at a series of parties, each more elegant than the last. The Americans were extravagantly friendly, but their preoccupations were not the same. At the Cole Porters’: ‘They all talk of war, but I have a feeling it is because it comes under their duty to us, that really the interest except to keep out has died in them.’ At luncheon with Mrs Ryan: ‘I felt I should have to leave, I was so ill and irritable.’ Under the surface sympathy anglophobia still ran strong. The only book widely advertised was Louis Bromfield’s The Rains Came, a novel about India sharply critical of British rule.
Diana found that she could not enjoy the New York life which once had seemed so delectable. She was taken to the smartest night-club, boasting what was said to be the best swing orchestra in America. ‘A room the size of the two Bognor sitting-rooms with a band composed of sixteen buck-niggers, bursting their cheeks and guts and bladders with blowing and banging and stamping and blaring. I got home at three and couldn’t sleep with the horror of it all, and the hideous expense [Diana was outraged to find the dollar had risen to $3.90 to the pound], and the great war, and the heart pounding against the electric air. The fire engines screech through the streets as soon as one drops off, and whine and yell like hell’s special sirens.’
A nightmare weekend with the Averell Harrimans provided little relief. There were thirty guests, mostly writers of one kind or another – Robert Sherwood, Harold Ross, George Abbott, Charles MacArthur – but as they passed their time drinking and playing endless games of dice, cards or Mah Jong, they might as well have been the most illiterate philistines. Any conversation was drowned by the thunder from the bowling-alley which adjoined the one vast drawing-room. There was no fixed time for meals; they were late or later and uneatable when they came, so that Diana was forced to creep into the kitchen and beg for a piece of cake. Charles MacArthur, then one of America’s most successful dramatists, passed out in the pantry three nights running and had to be carried upstairs to bed. ‘Why does Charles always choose the pantry?’ the guests asked crossly. ‘I thought it showed discretion on his part,’ commented Diana to Conrad. Duff managed to find a four of bridge but nobody paid the slightest attention to Diana and she spent most of the weekend in her room trying unavailingly to sleep.
Her spirits were not improved by her suspicion that nobody but Duff and herself was making any attempt to put over the British case. Apart from ‘a few cultural sods sent over by the Ministry of Information to talk about Swinburne’, the official voice was mute. Propaganda was believed to be vulgar, probably counter-productive. Those Britons that were to be heard said the wrong things. Freddie Lonsdale was a menace, ‘always saying Germany was sure to win and had been driven into war’. His camp followers were even worse. Duff berated them and they drifted on to Diana to complain. ‘Duff says we’re traitors,’ they protested. ‘That wouldn’t matter much,’ said Diana. ‘It’s the Americans saying it that riles me.’ They protested that everybody had a right to speak out, whereupon Diana asked why they had been asking people not to pass on to Duff what they had been saying. ‘They looked awfully guilty and slunk away much upset, but they will not profit or change their behaviour a jot. Only fear could do that, and we cannot frighten them.’
Her health did not make things any better. She went to a doctor to have wax removed from her ear, rashly admitted that she suffered also from chronic lumbago, and over her feeble protests, was stripped, X-rayed, stethoscoped, weighed and sent forth into the world swathed in twenty layers of white adhesive plaster. With the aid of Benzine and chloroform the mummy eventually managed to extricate itself from its carapace, but scarlet, covered with a rash and as sticky as fly-paper. At that evening’s dinner, given by Hamilton Fish Armstrong; ‘I dared not shake hands or pick anything up and my dress was stuck to me like rind to an apple.’ Perhaps in part because of this treatment, she passed the next few weeks in increasing discomfort from a skin disease and was reduced eventually to swollen, spotted shame. Dr Ludwig Loewenstein, America’s leading dermatologist, ‘put my head in a steaming machine, then under an X-ray, then under a violet ray, giving me injections in the bum and ointments and all the rest of it. Tea, out of the pot, has to be applied every morning and evening.’ The ointment, which smelt of dung, turned out to be the same as that used by would-be nigger-minstrels so, next day, ‘Poor Black Joe looks at me from the glass, underneath was lobster-red. Since applying the dregs of Duff’s morning tea it’s turned Hindoo. The smell of dung persists.’ Only her faith in Dr Loewenstein induced her to continue with the treatment, but she did, and faith was justified.
In Washington things began to go better. Duff was doubtful what sort of a reception they would get at the Embassy, but Lord Lothian welcomed them enthusiastically. ‘Giggly and pleasant and badly-dressed,’ Diana found him. He gave a dinner in Diana’s honour in which she sat next to the poet Archibald MacLeish. She delighted in him, and equally in his disconcertingly frumpish wife who won her heart by proclaiming after dinner: ‘The trouble about Mr Woollcott is that his flies are always open.’ Joseph Alsop met her at lunch at the Embassy and can still recall her piercing blue eyes and the white Molyneux dress with coffee-coloured trimmings which she wore on that occasion. It had been feared that the Ambassador might try to sabotage a proposed meeting with the President but, on the contrary, he expedited it. ‘He’ll say he’s met you before,’ he warned Diana. He did; the first words Roosevelt uttered were: ‘Lady Diana, come and sit next to me. I haven’t seen you since Paris, 1918.’ The President was gleeful over the recent repeal of the Neutrality Bill and made no pretence of being neutral himself. Perhaps deliberately he concentrated on Diana and avoided a tête-à-tête with Duff; the only direct question he asked him was the name of the head of Naval Intelligence, and as Duff could not remember, the conversation did not develop. ‘I was a bit nervous and didn’t do very well with him,’ Diana told John Julius, ‘but he did well with me. If his legs had not been paralysed he’d have danced a war-dance.’
From that moment all seemed to change. Diana felt as if some poison had mysteriously drained from her system. ‘My heart is no longer dead within me,’ she told Conrad. ‘It is heavy with sunk ships and a child and a lover I miss, but it’s alive again.’ She seemed too to sense a different spirit among the Americans. At a large luncheon given by Tom Lamont, an eminent banker, Mrs Lamont got to her feet and announced a toast which she said no one need drink if they did not want to: ‘Here’s to the victory of the Allies and to hell with neutrality!’ Everyone drank, though some with more enthusiasm than others, while Diana wept in gratitude. When Duff lectured in Brooklyn, trouble was predicted and five hundred police were posted around the auditorium. In the event only a handful of dispirited demonstrators appeared, carrying banners reading ‘We won’t be dragged in’ and ‘Send Duff home!’. ‘It merely gave Duff a chance to do a turkey-cock about the last stronghold of liberty being none too impregnable when you get demonstrations (there wasn’t one) and picketing (that hadn’t come off) against a man speaking his mind.’
For three months the Coopers were ceaselessly on the move. South Bend, Indiana, was the worst place they visited; Toledo, Ohio, the most agreeable. At Akron, Ohio, Diana was delighted by a bar with a panorama on one wall of a sandy bay edged with palm trees. Suddenly the view darkened, thunder pealed, lightning flashed, torrential rain descended. ‘It was all operated from a tiny magic electric box by two niggy-wigs who were enjoying it madly.’ Outside snow lay thick. At Chicago there was a St Andrew’s night dinner with a ram’s head, haggis, reels, sword-dance and Auld Lang Syne, but not a drop to drink. ‘What is the idea? Prohibition is dead. Is it a legacy? Why do they all have to drink behind closed doors? I can’t make it out.’ Dining in Boston she sat next to an American who told her he used to live in London, in Oxford Square. ‘To me,’ said Diana, recalling afternoons spent there with the Asquiths, ‘Oxford Square means painting a gigantic map on the wall. I wonder if it was washed out by the next tenant?’ ‘No,’ said the man. ‘I varnished it.’ Barbara Hutton arranged the list of those invited to Duff’s lecture in Palm Beach. Joseph Kennedy was not included, and when pressed for an explanation, Barbara Hutton explained that while he had been Ambassador in London she had found herself there, abandoned and unhappy. Kennedy was eager to help, but the help was to consist mainly of setting her up as his mistress. ‘I gather some pouncing accompanied these propositions,’ Diana wrote to Conrad. ‘How amusing, and how little I would have thought of it! Mr Asquith and Lord Wimborne, to think of only two old gentlemen, both put forward more or less the same plan to me, and I thought it so flattering. While poor Barbara feels she can never look Kennedy in the face again. She is probably right and I am wrong.’
At Fort Worth, Texas, they stayed with Amos Carter, ‘far and away the greatest boaster and god-darned bore we’ve hit yet.’ Over the huge log-fire was the stuffed head of a steer, his eyes flashing with red electric wrath, his nose snorting little puffs of smoke. Amos Carter disappeared and shortly afterwards the steer delivered a speech of welcome. Mr Carter possessed a collection of hats belonging to celebrities, including Lord Rothermere and the Prince of Wales, and a life-size wax nymph with eyelashes and real hair. The lecture that evening was introduced by the President’s son, Elliot Roosevelt, who opened question-time by asking, ‘Hasn’t the British Empire been built up by deeds similar to Hitler’s?’ Hardly, felt Diana, the question to be expected from your own chairman. It was at Fort Worth, too, that Duff was told of the appendicitis victim who pleaded that his navel should not be cut into. When asked why, he explained: ‘There is nothing I like better than lying naked on my bed eating celery, and I always put the salt in it.’ At Oklahoma City they went to see Gone With the Wind. When they entered the theatre everybody stood and sang ‘God Save the King’.
Hollywood was the furthest point of their expedition. They stayed with Jack Warner, richest and most powerful of the Warner brothers. ‘Diana is never happy in great comfort and longs to take me riding in the desert,’ noted Duff. ‘Also our host and hostess are almost rendering her anti-Semitic. To me people matter so much less than they do to her.’ But though the sybaritic luxury grated, she took a childish delight in meeting the stars. Dietrich came to dinner with Erich Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front. She was wearing a black trouser-suit made of velvet with Fauntleroy jabot and cuffs; ‘her face is really lovely,’ wrote Diana, ‘but she took so little interest in Duff and me that we are not very gone on her’. Errol Flynn she disliked intensely; apart from being anti-British and thinking the war foolish, he was vainer than any actor she had met. Charlie Chaplin she knew already. He was in the middle of making The Great Dictator, but though he said it was going to be magnificent, Diana had her doubts. She had an interminable conversation with him afterwards: ‘I did not think he made very much sense – who knows that the boot was not on the other foot!’ Of all the stars she met, her favourite was ‘a young man called James Stewart.’
Diana was more to Duff on this expedition than just a companion. He acclimatized well to his surroundings: ‘He has given up carrying a stick or umbrella,’ Diana told John Julius. ‘He is very energetic and full of hustle as though he thought “Time was Money”. He speaks through his nose and soon he will be wearing pince-nez and smoking a cheroot, and may even grow a little goatee beard.’ But though he had complete confidence on the lecture rostrum he found the necessary conviviality before and after the event a painful duty. He had no small talk and relied on Diana to ease his passage, in the same way as he had relied on her to make a success of his parties at Gower Street and Admiralty House. The lectures would have been well received in any case, but the affection that they left behind them was largely Diana’s doing.
Only the most churlish denied that the visit had been worthwhile. No dramatic shift in American policy ensued, but many people in a position to shape public opinion understood the British position better and felt more sympathy for it. Financially it had been less of a triumph. They had expected to make a minimum of $15,000 from the trip, but the expenses had been so great that they ended up with barely half that amount. Diana would not have cared if they had actually lost money, so pleased was she to be going home. She had as yet hardly adjusted to the austerity that lay ahead for Britain. Home thoughts from abroad in February 1940 included speculation as to where the Easter holidays should be spent. ‘Bognor will be frightfully cold. I have no servants but Wade, Nanny and the two Joneses. Can we run it on that? I don’t see why not, on lobsters, pâtés, salads, tinned stuff, baked potatoes. Then there is honey and cheese and prawns and tunny fish and foie gras that needs no cooking.’ A slight flavour of Marie Antoinette still clung about her a few weeks after her return. She speculated on why people would talk all the time about the food shortage. ‘I can’t think why, because there seems to be masses. The poor still refuse to eat all the things I love – hare, rabbits, venison, trout etc’ Such attitudes were not long to survive the opening of the total war.
*
The Coopers returned to find their Bognor cottage ‘dense with child-refugees’, the unfortunate exiles digging in the chilly sands with gas-masks dangling around their necks. Duff and Diana perched uneasily in Chapel Street but the house was too big, too difficult to run in wartime. Duff was unemployed and restless, Diana suffering with him, unable to settle to anything.
‘What a hopeless hell is it,’ she wrote to Juliet Duff, ‘so much worse than 1914 when there was a fanfare and a display of courage and high-spirits, cheering, boozing. I’m taking it like niggers and Jews are supposed to take danger – but don’t – with a drawn ghastly face no paint will disguise, wet hands, despairing lassitude. I’m deeply ashamed and feel it would be much better if I had anything to do, but I haven’t even a house to run. Two families with four children each are in occupation here, but they “do” for themselves and are no trouble at all. I’ve rung up the Labour Exchange about helping with the harvest but they say they know nothing about it. We can’t plant spuds till spring. Duff is, I can see, in a state of concealed restlessness. He has no job, he the great fire-eater – if I leave him for a second he’ll go to France as an interpreter or liaison man and I shall go out of my mind.’
At one point Duff actually set out to re-enlist in the Grenadiers. He had his old uniform altered, donned puttees and Sam Browne and set off for the wars. It was a gallant but abortive effort. The generals called him ‘Sir’ and it soon became clear that no one had a job for a fifty-year-old second lieutenant with several years of Cabinet service behind him.
Then came the invasion of Norway. In 1917 Duff had bet Patrick Shaw-Stewart £1,500 to £100 that Winston Churchill would never be Prime Minister. In May 1940 he lost his bet. Chamberlain’s Government fell, Churchill replaced him, and Duff was invited to serve as Minister of Information. It was not a post in which he was ever to feel at ease. He found his duties ill-defined and distasteful. Unjustly, he was attacked by the press for seeking to suppress their liberties, and found it temperamentally impossible to establish a relationship with proprietors or journalists that would remove the misunderstandings. To the public he was an ogre, none the less repellent for being slightly comical – ‘Cooper’s Snoopers’ became a by-word for official interference with the freedom of the individual. With little support from the Cabinet and less from his staff, his remedy was often to retreat to White’s and play bridge. ‘More impotent, more negligible and more defeated than one would have thought possible,’ was Cecil King’s judgement; and though it was unfairly harsh it was not wholly beside the mark.
Diana did her best to make things work. Eminent American journalists like Vincent Sheean, who might have been riled by the inevitable censorship, were lulled by her into a mood of acquiescence. Walter Monckton, one of the few wholly capable organizers on Duff’s staff and meditating escape to greener pastures, was surprised to get a ‘rather miserable’ letter from Diana begging him to stand by his minister. Her role was never more than peripheral, however; she hardly visited the ministry and knew little of Duff’s work. ‘Papa tells me nothing,’ she complained to John Julius. ‘It’s been a grievance for twenty years.’ Knowing that Duff was unhappy and disaffected, she suffered with him but could do little to help. ‘It’s a hard life, politics, and you must have most of the things in “If”. Papa has most of them and is unaffected by bludgeonings, but your poor Mummy had none of them.’
Her own wartime activity was helping in a canteen at the YMCA. Every morning she would rise at six-thirty, put on blue overalls and yachting cap and with tin hat and gas-mask over her shoulder make her way to the canteen. There was often no hot water, so the problem of giving breakfast to four hundred men could be considerable; but somehow it was managed. Cooking, serving and washing up took till mid-day. Then it was home for a bath and usually abortive telephoning, and off to Chapel Street to pack up books, pictures and china for eventual storage at Belvoir. Most dreaded disturbance of the routine was the periodic giving of blood. The process filled her with horror, not least because her veins seemed to be abnormally slim and the doctor would have to battle with his ‘big, blunt bodkin’ to secure an entry. ‘The tears run out of my eyes in torrents. “Does it really hurt so much?” asked the doctor, but I couldn’t answer for tears.’
After the evacuation from Dunkirk Diana was asked to work with the Free French who were billeted at Olympia. This soon palled, however. All she was given to do was sew tricolors on soldiers’ caps, ‘speak French to them in my inimitable way, sell them toothpaste and bootlaces and seek out girl-friends for those who seemed most deserving’. Washing up four hundred breakfasts in cold, greasy water seemed a better use of her energies.
She was filled with plans for aiding the war-effort. One problem that concerned her was how British soldiers were to be distinguished from German parachutists. Badges or armlets would not provide an answer since they could be taken from the dead. Suddenly she thought of war-paint. Taint all our boys’ faces blue one day, scarlet the next, tiger stripes another day or snow-white. I don’t see how the enemy could catch up on that.’ Another brainwave which she hastened to pass on to the War Office provided for ‘some very strong magnates [sic] in open spaces – parks and even squares – to attract the land mines that come down slowly by parachute’. The authorities wrote to assure her that ‘a great many of the suggestions they received were far more foolish than hers’.
She was swept away by the mood of defiant patriotism that consumed Britain in 1940. The Duke of Windsor outraged her by allegedly saying that the English must be mad not to see they were doomed: ‘Well, maybe we are, but I’d rather be mad than turned slave by fear or reason.’ But she could not go so far as those of her friends who hungered for the Germans to come so that they might be defeated. ‘Your poor mother was never as brave as that,’ she told John Julius. ‘I would rather victory was achieved by famine and revolt in Europe than by hideous hordes in England.’ She was confident that God was on the right side. ‘It’s difficult, I find, to pray about the war, one feels both sides are praying equally hard. Still, I think that is the best we can do. He knows we’re fighting for all that Christ taught us was good and that the Huns are not. I love God and greatly rely on Him.’
Her son’s safety preoccupied her and when Joe Kennedy, the American Ambassador, offered to procure him a passage in a neutral ship to the United States, she leapt at the idea. She realized that to some this would look like cowardice and was disturbed by Churchill’s disapproval – ‘I hate these little Ambassadors,’ he snorted – but the counter-arguments seemed to her too strong. She was haunted by the vision of Britain over-run, Duff with the Government in Exile and John Julius held by the Germans as a hostage. Duff initially resisted the idea but allowed himself to be overborne. Possibly he suspected that, if necessary, Diana would have had John Julius passed from hand to hand like a recusant priest and shipped illegally from the country. If he had pleaded that his son’s evacuation would damage his career, Diana might have yielded, but arguments based on the national interest seemed to her unconvincing. They had to weather a certain amount of hostile comment, and Diana got a brief flurry of indignant letters and telephone calls, but the matter was soon forgotten in the larger crisis.
John Julius left in July 1940. The Daily Mirror carried a picture of him ‘sitting on your pathetic bottom on your pathetic trunk. You looked like all the refugees of the world rolled into one wistful little victim of the Nazi follow-my-leader. I nearly howled.’ He was carried to America on a tide of exhortations. Kaetchen Kommer, who was charged with his welfare, was to make sure that John Julius was never spoiled. It was to be buses, not taxis; drug stores, not restaurants; clothes from Bloomingdale’s, not Saks. If he was rude to Americans, imitated their accent or behaved less than perfectly, he was to be severely reproved. To her son she wrote: ‘Remember always that you represent England in your way and that you must be respected by all the boys and masters as much as you want them to respect and admire our adored England. Don’t forget that there’s a war being fought and that it’s got to be won, and that your contribution towards winning it is to be better, more hard-working, more thoughtful and braver than usual.’
She was very aware that she was depriving John Julius of an experience which he might come to regret. The old gardener at Bognor underlined this poignantly. ‘Wouldn’t John just love it,’ he said repeatedly. ‘There’s a German plane lying at Rose Green and another in Pagham Harbour. The dead Germans are still lying there. Smell something frightful, they do. Wouldn’t John just love it!’ John would just have loved it, but there was time enough for that. Whatever the course of the war might be, Diana knew that it could not possibly be a short one. Her son, she decided, should come back when he was thirteen. ‘Thirteen I feel to be an age of grown-upness when you are no longer to be treated as a baby that must have bangs and alarms and disease and hunger kept from it. At thirteen you will feel perhaps that you must share in the struggles of other English boys who are here.’
*
By now they were installed in a bilious-coloured suite on the eighth floor of the Dorchester Hotel. They got it cheap, because few others wanted rooms so close to the roof. Otherwise the hotel was much favoured among the homeless rich, its ultra-modern wind-resistant steel structure offering, in theory at least, protection against acts of God or man. The place seethed with friends and acquaintances; Emerald Cunard, the Halifaxes, Ann O’Neill were permanent residents; Evelyn Waugh, trying to spend a night near Diana, was offered the choice between the Turkish baths and St John Hutchinson’s bed if neither he nor his daughter were using it. Cecil Beaton left a vivid impression of life in the hotel lobby one September evening in 1940:
The scene is like that on a transatlantic crossing, in a luxury liner, with all the horrors of enforced jocularity and expensive squalor … Diana is nervous: she darts, every so often, with enquiries to the hall-porter. As she staggers down the lobby like a doll with its leg put on sideways, the fellow-passengers point, ‘That’s Lady Diana. Doesn’t she look Bohemian!’ Duff is late. Why hasn’t he come home? Has he had a heart attack, been run over, bombed? [Duff returns.] Diana totters towards him. Instead of saying ‘Evening darling’ she stands at bay ten paces from him and snorts and snarls while he snarls back. They throw a few statements at one another, then dash lovingly into the elevator.
Life in a grand hotel, indeed any hotel, suited Diana well. She felt singularly little of the nesting instinct common to most women. In the Dorchester all was uncluttered: ‘I feel as free of possessions as a bird – just the clothes I am wearing, the book I am reading, the letter that has to be answered.’ Provided she could be surrounded by her friends she would have been almost as happy in the park or in a public lavatory. In the Dorchester she could hold court. Conrad complained bitterly about ‘that horde of hard-faced tipsy women who occupy your sitting and bedroom from 6 p.m. onwards.’ Regular habituées were Ann O’Neill, Phyllis de Janzé, Maureen Stanley, Venetia Montagu, Juliet Duff, Moura Budberg, Virginia Cowles and Pamela Berry – some harder-featured and some no doubt tipsier than others.
There was always something going on in the Dorchester: half a dozen tables of friends to join in the restaurant; a party at Emerald Cunard’s. She saw in the New Year on 31 December 1940 with Ann O’Neill. There were pipers downstairs and one was kidnapped, ‘a god of beauty seven feet high, golden haired with skirts skirling, bonnet at a brave angle, ribbons flying and that appalling noise coming from the pigskin under his arm’. Everyone swooned and said there was nothing like the pipes (‘There isn’t, thank God!’ was Diana’s comment) and then someone asked him to play the tune he had just played, which did not surprise him in the least since no one could ever recognize a tune on the bagpipes. So round and round he tramped, and then he played a reel and no one could dance it except Diana and her hostess, ‘so the old girl swirled and the weight lifted from my heart for a while. So maybe there is something to be said for the pipes after all.’
That autumn the blitz burst over London. Diana telephoned Kommer. He was to approach the President, who in turn was to urge the Pope to call on the belligerents to stop bombing capital cities. Somewhere along the chain of command the message faltered and was lost. The disadvantages of the top floor of the Dorchester now became apparent as incendiaries thudded on the roof above, the building quivered as bombs fell all round and the anti-aircraft guns in the park seemed to be firing a few feet from the window. Duff slept peacefully through the worst of it, Diana was in an agony of apprehension from the first wail of the siren. After several prolonged arguments Duff finally agreed that they should sleep in the gymnasium, which had been turned into a dormitory. Night after night they shuffled down, to lie hugger-mugger with all that was most distinguished in London society. Everyone had their own torch, ‘and I see their monstrous profiles projected caricaturishly on the ceiling magic-lantern-wise. Lord Halifax is unmistakable.’ In the end Diana plucked up her courage and decreed that they should defy the Germans and remain in their own beds. The bombing began and Duff, seeing how his wife was suffering, insisted they should abandon their resolution and go downstairs. Diana refused. To encourage her, Duff went off alone to the gymnasium; Diana obstinately stuck it out; and the night ended with Duff fuming below and Diana in an agony of fear above.
Diana longed to leave London, if only Duff would come too and the retreat could be arranged with dignity. A chance seemed to offer when Lord Lothian, British Ambassador in Washington, died in office. Might Duff get the vacant Embassy? ‘I’d ring Winston up and say please,’ Diana told John Julius, ‘if I didn’t know that Papa would throttle me.’ In the end the job went to Lord Halifax, and the occasional weekend in the country was the only escape from the blitz that Diana could contrive. Several times they went to Ditchley, home of the Ronald Trees, where Churchill used to pass the Saturdays and Sundays of full moon. Armed guards were at every door, the house swarming with D M Is and AOCs and other incomprehensible sets of initials in medals and red tabs. It was a great deal better than London but hardly relaxing.
Other friends offered temporary refuges. They spent weekends with the Rothschilds at Tring and Waddesdon, Lord Dudley at Himley, the Wallaces at Lavington, the Gilbert Russells at Mottisfont. Only when she got away from the bombs did she realize how much she hated them. ‘It’s still pouring, but I wouldn’t mind if it was snowing ink,’ she wrote from Lavington. ‘Anything, anything, not to be in London. I don’t think I shall ever want to live there again – never, never.’ Friends suggested that she should stay with them when Duff went back; there was just as useful work to be done in the country. ‘I can’t desert Mr Micawber,’ Diana concluded sadly; and back they would trail at dawn on Monday.
At Ewhurst, staying with the Duchess of Westminster, Diana retreated to bed while the others played bridge. The planes buzzed overhead and she felt scared and lonely. Discovering an empty bedroom directly above the bridge-players she crept along to it, jumped heavily on the floor and then rushed back to bed. One of the guests, Ian Fleming, came up to find the incendiary bomb. He agreed with Diana that they were absolute shits to leave her alone, and went happily back to finish the rubber. Diana let fifteen minutes pass, then went back to her bombing range, this time clambering on to a table before jumping. The crash shook the house and the whole party rushed upstairs. ‘Was that you, Diana?’ asked Duff suspiciously, but she seemed to be fast asleep and having got so far the bridge-players decided to go to bed.
At Tring she discovered a deserted folly not far from the house and tried to persuade Lord Rothschild to let her take it over. She could rent it, she calculated, for £1 a week, as against £15 at the Dorchester, feed herself and Duff for £3 a week, ‘and wash him and soap him and light him to bed and give him Vichy water and his Times for another £1’. She would plant vegetables and keep hens, feed such friends as would venture down from London, and even be able to pay off the outstanding taxes. The idea enraptured her, and when it came to nothing she looked elsewhere. They had a cottage at Bognor; why should she not set up a farm there and provide a base where Duff could sleep away from the intrusive bombs?
Bognor was not what it used to be. The evacuees had gone but monstrous accretions of barbed wire prevented access to the beach, a concrete pill-box and gun blocked the gate into the wood, and there were ARP workers sleeping in the stables. The land was still there, however, and any other problem could be overcome. Diana flung herself energetically into her new activity: buying bee-hives, a butter churn, a henhouse, four goats, a cow; building an outdoor fireplace ‘on which to bubble my trouble for the piggywigs’; poring over manuals on fowl-pox, fowl-pest, white diarrhoea and various unmentionable diseases of the udder, puzzling over the arcane lore proffered by Conrad Russell.
Conrad made the exercise possible. Every week he deserted his own demanding occupations and spent a minimum of ten hours in the tedious travail of wartime railway journeys, so as to pass a night at Bognor and help with the farm. ‘Sweet Conrad, help me with my farm! Help me until it hurts, as Wilkie says. I’m sure you will!’ He did, profligate as ever in energy, advice, admiration and love. His sisters complained that he was being exploited. So he was, but to be exploited was his delight. ‘I love Bognor and your goodness to me in letting me come so often,’ he wrote, and when the farm was closed down he lost the greatest pleasure of his life.
Princess, the cow, was the most valued member of the menagerie. The first night after her arrival she escaped and ambled off to rejoin her old friends at a neighbouring farm. Diana recaptured her and began to lead her home, taking with her a bag of cattle-meal as bait. All went well till they were passing the local shopping-centre, when Princess struck. ‘I pulled from in front and kicked from behind and hullaballooed and shouted and threatened and cursed and even pretended to eat the meal myself to show how good it was.’ Literally and metaphorically, Princess was unmoved. Eventually, a group of soldiers arrived and more or less carried the cow to its yard. There Diana milked and left her, but within a few minutes she was on the move again. Mrs Barham saw her go, but Mrs Barham was from London and thought all cows were dragons and refused to venture out until she was out of sight. For a few days Princess, consumed by nostalgia, sought endlessly to rejoin her former cronies, but then she settled down; a feminine equivalent of ‘Ferdinand’, Cecil Beaton described her, ‘for there never was so clinging and affectionate an animal’.
Princess produced twenty pounds of cheese a week, as well as plentiful milk and butter. Diana was ‘white-fingered’, said Daphne Fielding, ‘so that milk in her hands turned serenely to golden butter and ambrosial cheese’. The goat proved more troublesome, tearing its udder on the barbed wire and trying to bite Diana when she milked it. It was part of the establishment, however, and she was proudly loyal to it. She got a peremptory note one morning from the head of the ARP workers who shared a stable with the goat. The smell was unpleasant, could the animal please be removed. It was a funny thing, replied Diana, but only that morning the goat had made the same complaint about the ARP workers. It was well known that nanny-goats didn’t smell, but she was going to get a billy goat if she could, and then the ARP workers would have something to complain about. ‘They ought to have a spell in London and smell burnt flesh, instead of lying in a comfortable room and smelling through their snores the smell that every farmer loves because it means produce and wealth and nourishment.’
There was no Marie Antoinette posing about the farm. Problems proved endless. She had rations for only half her hens, so begged stale bread from the local baker. She was taken to law for her pains but fought the case and was acquitted with honour and a guinea costs. She had no pond for her ducks and bemoaned the fact that they were nevertheless saddled with ‘those awful feet. It seems dreadfully cruel, like taking the snow but leaving our skis on.’ The pigs grew large as ponies, knocked her over and trampled on her. The queen bee stung her on the nose. Misled by her Shakespearean recollections, she grasped the nettle danger and plucked from it not safety but a bad case of nettle-rash. She treated herself with morphine, which only doubled the agony because to some people the drug was an active itch-promoter. Princess developed rheumatic fever and had to be fed by hand. ‘Farming has got beyond me,’ she complained. ‘The crisis of high summer gives me no time for lunch even.’
With it all she was sublimely happy. She had found a means of escaping from London with honour. She was doing work which she found unexpectedly fulfilling. She was making a real if small contribution to the war-effort. Duff got catarrh and urged Diana not to catch it too. Who, he asked, would run the farm if she did? ‘Oh, I shan’t be ill,’ replied Diana with less than her usual tact. ‘People with something vitally important to do never are ill.’ She had succeeded in creating a productive and efficient smallholding on relatively small expenditure. Princess was in calf; the goat giving rich, good milk; hens and ducks were laying; seven pigs ‘like dreadfully castrated little sods fat and white on tiny feet’ were fattening for the market; thirty-five rabbits of different ages followed the same course and provided gloves for airmen into the bargain; she was self-sufficient in everything but bread. For someone with no help save Conrad’s occasional visits and with no previous experience of any kind, it was an impressive achievement. ‘I did not dream last winter,’ she told Kommer, ‘in my very acute misery, that I could be happy again, and here I find myself beginning my fourth month without once leaving the country, as happy as I have been for so long a period for years and years. I always knew London was not for me. I never want to see it again, poor city. It is a seat of nervous futility to me, while the life of an intelligent rustic labourer suits me to perfection.’
When Diana was still dreaming of her pavilion at Tring she explained to St John Hutchinson how nice it would be for Duff to be able to come home to the country every evening. ‘You wouldn’t ask Duff to do that, surely?’ said Hutchinson in dismay.
‘Why not?’
‘Well, you can’t expect him to spend every evening alone with you. He likes bridge and fun.’
‘Yes, but he likes the country and reading and quiet from bombs also.’
‘Well, I think that’s really asking too much of him!’
Diana was humiliated and alarmed. Would Duff so dislike the life of a wartime commuter? If he did, he concealed it. He kept a room in the basement of the Chapel Street house, where Daisy Fellowes was now ensconced, but most evenings made the journey to Bognor and seemed to thrive on it.
Life in fact offered more than the secluded tranquillity that St John Hutchinson envisaged. Evelyn Waugh came for the weekend to find the Duchess of Westminster already there, ‘Diana with grimy hands fretting about coupons and pig-swill. Fine wine. Vice Versa read aloud, gin rummy.’ He returned in mid-week to find Desmond MacCarthy, Katharine Asquith and Maud Russell staying. Diana enlisted them all to help with the chores on the farm and managed to convince them that it was fun. Emerald Cunard descended in her country clothes – leopard-skin coat, pearls, béret basque and exceedingly high-heeled shoes. She teetered around: ‘Oh, Diana, this is very interesting! How do you do it? These are your pigs? Very interesting pigs! How can you milk that cow?’ She insisted on carrying the milk and was butted to the ground by Princess, who evidently took exception to her leopard-skin. Food was always excellent, wine good and plentiful; one evening Ronald Storrs came down with Duff and the three of them consumed four bottles of claret and one of port.
Duff was all the more ready to leave London because his work at the Ministry of Information filled him with chagrin and distaste. Eventually his resignation was accepted and he was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, traditionally the odd-job man of the Cabinet. The first odd job was already awaiting him. Churchill was uneasy about the state of preparation of the British in the Far East. Duff, it was decreed, was to go out there to take a look.